
Qass. 
Book. 



ESSAYS 
HISTORICAL AND LITERARY 



■ j^^y^- 



Essays 

Historical and Literary 



BY 



JOHN FISKE 



Study as if for Life Eternal, live prepared to die to-morrow." 

— MONKISH PROVERB. 



TWO VOLUMES IN ONE 

VOLUME I 

SCENES AND CHARACTERS IN AMERICAN 
HISTORY 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1907 

^11 rights reser'ved 






Copyright, 1902, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 

Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1902. Reprinted 
November, 1902; February, 1903. 
New edition, two volumes in one, May, 1907 



Naiinaoti i^rns 

J. 8. Gushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



CONTENTS 

PACK 

I. Thomas Hutchinson, Last Royal Governor of 

Massachusetts i 

II. Charles Lee, Soldier of Fortune . . .53 

III. Alexander Hamilton and the Federalist Party . 99 

IV. Thomas Jefferson, the Conservative Reformer . 143 

V. James Madison, the Constructive Statesman . 183 

VI. Andrew Jackson, Frontiersman and Soldier . 219 

VII. Andrew Jackson and American Democracy Sev- 
enty Years Ago ....... 265 

VIII. Harrison, Tyler, and the Whig Coalition (" Tip- 
pecanoe and Tyler too ") . . . . -315 

IX. Daniel Webster and the Sentiment of Union . 363 
Index 411 



INTRODUCTION 

The material in this volume was intended, by the 
Author, to be embodied in a greater work, A History 
of the American People. Many of these chapters 
were given by him as lectures in every part of our 
broad country, always enlarging and strengthening 
the bond of friendship with his people — who freely 
gave him such personal opinions, letters, and private 
documents as aided him in perfecting his historical 
work. Some of these letters, of especial significance, 
I have here included as notes. 

Through the courtesy of D. Appleton & Company, I 
am enabled to reproduce in the essays — Charles Lee, 
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, 
and Daniel Webster — biographical passages written 
by the Author for the Encyclopaedia of American 
Biography. 

ABBY MORGAN FISKE. 

Westgate, 

September 26, 1902. 



Vii 



THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 

One of the most encouraging features of the age in 
which we Hve is the rapidity with which the bitter 
feehngs attendant upon a terrible civil war have faded 
away and given place to mutual friendliness and 
esteem between gallant men who, less than thirty years 
ago, withstood one another in deadly strife. Among 
our public men who hunger for the highest offices, a 
few Rip van Winkles are still to be found who, with- 
out sense enough to realize the folly and wickedness of 
their behaviour, try now and then to fan into fresh life 
the dying embers of sectional prejudice and distrust; 
but their speech has lost its charm, and those that bow 
the ear to it are few. The time is at hand when we 
may study the great Civil War of the nineteenth cen- 
tury as dispassionately as we study that of the seven- 
teenth ; and the warmest admirer of Cromwell and 
Lincoln may rejoice in belonging to a race of men 
that has produced such noble Christian heroes as 
Lucius, Viscount Falkland, and General Robert Lee. 
Such a time seems certainly not far off when we see 
how pleasantly the generals of opposing armies can 
now sit down and tell their reminiscences, and discuss 
each other's opinions and conduct in the pages of a 
popular magazine. 

3 



4 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

Had the Civil War resulted in dividing the United 
States into two distinct nations, such an era of recon- 
ciliation would, of course, have been long delayed. 
With most people the sentiment of patriotism, which 
now extends, however inadequately, over the whole 
country, would then have become restricted to half of 
it. It would have been long before an independent 
Confederacy could have recognized the personal merit 
of men who strove with might and main to prevent 
its independence ; and it would have been long before 
the defeated and curtailed United States could have 
been expected to admire the character or do justice to 
the motives of those who had shorn it of power and 
prestige. When one group of people owes its national 
existence to the military humiliation of another, the 
situation is very unfavourable for correct historical 
judgments, and it is apt to fare ill with the reputation 
of men who have been upon the unpopular side. Such, 
for the past hundred years, have been the relations 
between the United States and Great Britain, and 
accordingly many of the illustrious men of the Revo- 
lutionary period are still sadly misunderstood, in the 
one countr)' if not in the other. The two foremost 
men of the time, the two that tower above all others 
in that century, Washington and Chatham, are indeed 
accepted as heroes in both countries ; their fame is the 
common possession of the English race. The admi- 
ration which our British cousins feel for Washington 
is perhaps even more disinterested than that which 
we Americans feel for our eloquent defender, Chat- 
ham ; but in either case the homage is paid to tran- 
scendent greatness. In the portraits of too many of 
the actors upon our Revolutionary scene, the brush of 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 5 

partisan prejudice has obscured or distorted the true 
features. To this day British writers are apt to speak 
of Patrick Henry as a ranting fire-eater, and Samuel 
Adams as a tricksome demagogue ; while upon the 
pages of American historians may be found remarks 
that, as applied to such high-minded gentlemen as 
Burgoyne or Cornwallis, are simply silly. 

But of all the men of that day none have fared so 
ill as the American loyalists. They were not only out 
of sympathy with the declared policy of their country, 
but they were on the losing side. As a party they 
were crushed out of existence, as individuals they were 
driven into exile by thousands ; and for a long time 
their voice was silenced. Liberal leaders in England, 
like Fox and Richmond, who hailed with glee the 
news of each American victory, were equally out of 
sympathy with the declared policy of their own coun- 
try ; but they were, nevertheless, a power in the land. 
The unanswerable logic of events was on their side ; 
it was they that could say, " We told you so " ; they 
represented principles that triumphed at Yorktown and 
were soon to triumph in England. The American 
loyalists, on the other hand, represented principles 
that have been irredeemably and forever discredited. 
They set themselves in opposition to the strongest 
and most wholesome instinct of the English race, the 
inborn love of self-government ; and they have incurred 
the fate which is reserved for men who diverge too 
widely from the progressive movement of the age in 
which they live. It becomes difficult for the next age 
to understand them, or to attribute their behaviour to 
anything but sheer perverseness. Yet among these 
American loyalists were men of noblest character and 



6 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

purest patriotism : and we need only to divest our- 
selves for the moment of the knowledge of subsequent 
events which in their day none could foresee ; we 
need only to put ourselves back, in imagination, into 
the circumstances amid which their opinions were 
formed and their actions determined, in order to do 
justice to the deep humanity that was in them. We 
may dissent from their opinions, and disapprove their 
actions as heartily as ever ; but it is our duty, as stu- 
dents of history, to take our stand upon that firm 
ground where, freed from the fleeting passions of a 
day, true manliness may be taken for its worth. 

Among the American loyalists of the Revolutionary 
period there is perhaps none who has had such hard 
measure as Thomas Hutchinson. It may be doubted 
if any other American in high position, except Benedict 
Arnold, has ever incurred so much obloquy. But to 
couple these two names, even for a moment, is gross 
injustice to the last royal governor of Massachusetts. 
Alike for intellectual eminence and for spotless purity 
of character, there have been few Americans more 
thoroughly entitled to our respect than Thomas 
Hutchinson. It is sad indeed, though perfectly natu- 
ral, that such a man should have had to wait a hundred 
years before his countrymen could come to consider 
his career dispassionately, and see him in the light in 
which he would himself have been willing to be seen. 
Let us take a brief survey of the personal history of 
this man ; and as he belonged to a family distinguished 
in both the Old World and the New, let us begin with a 
glance at his ancestry. 

In the English literature of the seventeenth century 
there are few books more charming than the memoirs 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 7 

of Colonel John Hutchinson of Owthorpe, written by 
his widow Lucy. Nowhere do we get a pleasanter 
picture of domestic life in the time of Charles I., or of 
the personality of a great Puritan soldier, than in those 
strong pages, glowing with sweet wifely devotion. 
This John Hutchinson, valiant defender of Notting- 
ham and regicide judge, was eleventh in descent from 
Bernard Hutchinson, of Cowland, in Yorkshire, a 
doughty knight of the time of Edward I. From the 
same Bernard, apparently through Richard of Wyck- 
ham, in the sixth generation, in a chain of which one 
link still awaits complete verification, came Edward 
Hutchinson, of Alford, in Lincolnshire, who flourished 
in the reign of Elizabeth, but lived long enough to see 
hundreds of his friends and neighbours forsake their 
homes and set forth under Winthrop's leadership to 
found a colony in Massachusetts Bay. From one of 
Edward's younger sons are descended the Irish earls 
of Donoughmore, including the able general who, for 
overthrowing the remnant of Napoleon's army in 
Egypt in 1801, was first raised to the peerage as Lord 
Hutchinson. Edward's eldest son, William, born two 
years before the defeat of the Spanish Armada, was 
married in 161 2 to Anne Marbury, daughter of a 
Lincolnshire clergyman, a scion of the distinguished 
family of Sir Walter Blunt. Anne's mother was sister 
to Sir Erasmus Dryden, grandfather of the great poet. 
William and his wife were warm friends and adhe- 
rents of John Cotton, rector of St. Botolph's, and after 
that famous divine had taken his departure for New 
England, they were not long in following him. Will- 
iam's father, the venerable Edward, had died in 1631 ; 
and three years afterward, taking the widowed mother, 



8 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

Susanna, the wife, and fourteen children, William 
made his way across the Atlantic to Boston, where he 
proceeded to build a comfortable house on the site 
where now stands the Old Corner Bookstore. There, 
however, he was not destined long to dwell. The 
Antinomian heresy soon roused such fierce disputes as 
to threaten the very existence of the colony, and Mrs. 
Hutchinson, as the leading agitator, was tried for sedi- 
tion and banished. Early in 1638 the family fled to 
the Narragansett country, where at first they were fain 
to seek shelter in a cave. But presently Mr. Hutchin- 
son, with William Coddington and a few faithful fol- 
lowers, bought the island of Aquednek from the 
Indians for forty fathoms of white wampum, and 
forthwith the building of the towns of Portsmouth 
and Newport went on briskly. In 1642, when Mr. 
Hutchinson died, the outlook for the little colony was 
dubious. The New England Confederacy was about 
to be formed, and there were strong hints that the 
Rhode Island settlements, if they would share in its 
advantages, must put themselves under the jurisdic- 
tion either of Massachusetts or of Plymouth. Absurd 
and horrible tales were told about Mrs. Hutchinson, 
and found many believers. There were some who 
suspected her of being a paramour of Satan, and per- 
haps the fear of arrest on a charge of witchcraft may 
have had something to do with her next move. At all 
events, soon after her husband's death, the poor woman, 
with most of her children and a few friends, removed 
to a place since known as Pelham, a few miles west of 
Stamford and within the tolerant jurisdiction of the 
New Netherlands. There in the course of the follow- 
ing year they were all cruelly murdered by Indians, 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 9 

save one little ten-year-old daughter, Susanna, who 
was ransomed after four years of captivity. 

In this wholesale massacre the eldest son, Edward, 
was not included. At the time of his mother's banish- 
ment he was twenty-five years old. He had lately 
returned from a visit to England, bringing with him a 
fair young bride who was admitted to communion 
with the First Church in Boston in December, 1638. 
While Edward's loyalty to his mother got him so far 
into trouble that he was heavily fined and sentence of 
banishment was passed upon him, we may imagine 
that his wife's orthodoxy may have helped him some- 
what in making his peace with the magistrates of the 
Puritan commonwealth. At any rate he spent the rest 
of his life in Boston, where for seventeen years he was 
a deputy in the General Court. He was also the chief 
commander of horse in the colony, and in the summer 
of 1675, after the disastrous beginning of King Philip's 
War, he was sent to Brookfield to negotiate with the 
Nipmuck Indians. The treacherous savages appointed 
the time and place for a rendezvous, but lay in ambush 
for Captain Hutchinson as he approached, and slew 
him, with several of his company. 

Of Edward's twelve children, the eldest son, Elisha, 
came to be judge of common pleas and member of 
the council of assistants, and in 1688 was joined with 
Increase Mather, in London, in protesting against the 
high-handed conduct of Sir Edmund Andros. One 
of the earliest recollections of the royal governor was 
the great pomp of his grandfather Elisha's funeral on a 
bleak December day of 171 7, when the militia com- 
panies and the chief dignitaries of the province marched 
in stately procession to the place of burial. As Elisha 



lO THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

left twelve children, the Hutchinson family in New 
England was getting to be a large one ; and we find 
many of them in places of distinction and trust. 
Elisha's eldest son, Thomas, became a wealthy mer- 
chant and ship-owner. For twenty-six years he was a 
member of the council of assistants, and was noted for 
his resolute integrity and the fearlessness with which 
he spoke his mind without regard to the effect upon 
his popularity. He was also noted for a public-spirited 
generosity so lavish as to have made serious inroads 
upon his princely fortune. He has been called ^ " one 
of Boston's greatest benefactors." At his death, in 
1739, though still a very rich man, he lamented his 
inability to provide for his children on a scale com- 
mensurate with his wishes. One can readily believe 
that such families as these men had must have heavily 
taxed their resources. This Thomas Hutchinson's 
children were twelve in number, which seems to have 
been the normal rate of multiplication in that family. 
His wife, Sarah Foster, a lady of sterling character 
and sense, was daughter of Colonel John Foster, who 
took an active part in the insurrection which overthrew 
the government of Andros. Their fourth child and 
eldest surviving son, Thomas, most illustrious and in 
some respects most unhappy of this remarkable family, 
was born on the 9th of September, 1 7 1 1 , in that stately 
house in the old north end of Boston to which our 
attention will by and by again be directed. At five 
years of age the little Thomas began to con his multi- 
plication table and spelling-book in the North gram- 
mar school on Bennet Street, which his father had 
lately founded, and over the lintel of which were en- 

lE. G. Porter, " Rambles in Old Boston," p. 205. 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS II 

graved the arms of the Hutchinsons of Lincolnshire. 
Thus in daily going out and in at the door, as in the 
vague wonder of the grandsire's stately funeral, may 
the thoughtful and impressible child, in somewhat the 
mood of a generous little prince, have come to feel 
himself identified with the civic life of Boston. Of 
adulation for such boys there is usually enough and to 
spare ; but Thomas Hutchinson was not of the sort 
that is easily spoiled. In the writings of his later 
years, amid all the storm and stress of a troubled life, 
nothing is more conspicuous than the absence of per- 
sonal vanity and the sweetness of temper with which 
events are judged aside from their bearings upon 
himself. 

In the simple school life of those days there were 
not so many subjects to be half learned as now, and 
boys became freshmen at a very tender age. Hutch- 
inson was barely sixteen when he received his bach- 
elor's degree at Harvard, and in after years he frankly 
confessed that he could not clearly see what he had 
done to earn it. At first the ledger interested him 
more than the lexicon. He carried on a little foreign 
trade by sending ventures in his father's ships, and 
thus earned enough money to have defrayed the whole 
cost of his education, while at the same time he became 
an expert in bookkeeping. In those days Harvard 
students were graded according to social position. 
Early in the freshman year a list of names was hung 
in the college buttery, and those at the top were al- 
lowed the best rooms and other privileges. Usually 
this list remained without change, and it is in this 
order that the names appear on the triennial catalogue 
until 1773, when the democratic alphabet took its 



12 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

place. In the class of 1727, which numbered thirty- 
seven students, the only names above Hutchinson's 
were those of the two Brownes, one of whom was after- 
ward son-in-law of Governor Burnet and father of one 
of the ''mandamus councillors" of 1774. Another 
distinguished member of the class was Jonathan 
Trumbull, the great " war governor " of Connecticut 
and valued friend of Washington, and according to 
one tradition, the original " Brother Jonathan." 

It was after Hutchinson had left college, and become 
an apprentice in his father's counting-room, that the 
scholarly impulse seized and mastered him. He fell 
in love with the beauties of Latin, and diligently used 
his leisure evenings until he had become fairly accom- 
plished in that language ; to this he soon added a 
practical knowledge of French. Of history he was 
always fond. As a child he would rather curl down 
in the chimney corner and pore over Church's " Indian 
War " and Morton's " New England Memorial " than 
coast and snowball with boys in the street; and his 
Puritan education did not prevent him from shedding 
tears over the sufferings and death of King Charles. 
The seventy-fours and frigates that now and then 
sailed into Boston harbour, stately and beautiful, and 
symbolic of England's empire, had a special charm for 
him. In their snug cabins he found agreeable com- 
panions, among them Lieutenant Hawke, afterward to 
be known as one of the greatest of British sea kings. 
Still pleasanter society was found in the household 
of a widow lady, with three beautiful daughters, who 
had lately moved to Boston from Rhode Island. To 
Margaret Sanford, the second daughter, aged seven- 
teen, Hutchinson was married in 1734. In the course 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 1 3 

of the following year he became a member of the Con- 
gregational church on Hanover Street, known at that 
time as the New Brick Church. Throughout his life 
he was strictly religious, according to the Puritanism 
of the eighteenth century, which in Massachusetts had 
already come to be much more genial and liberal than 
that of the seventeenth. 

Hutchinson's public life began soon after his mar- 
riage. In his diary he tells how much pleasure he felt 
when, in his twenty-sixth year, he was chosen a select- 
man for the town of Boston, and a few weeks later a 
representative in the General Court. But his public 
career was stormy from the outset. The people were 
then greatly agitated over the question of paper money. 
As long ago as 1690, upon the return of Sir William 
Phips from his disastrous expedition against Quebec, 
Massachusetts had issued promissory notes, called 
bills of credit, in denominations from 2 s. to £io\ 
they were receivable for sums due to the public treas- 
ury. The inevitable results followed. The promissory 
notes issued by a government which had no cash for 
paying its debts, and because it had no cash, of course 
fell in value. Coin was therefore driven from circu- 
lation, and there was a great inflation of prices, with 
frequent and disastrous fluctuations. The disturbance 
of trade became serious, and then, as always, trick- 
some demagogues played upon the popular ignorance, 
which sought a cure for the disease in fresh issues of 
paper. Pretty much the same nonsense was talked in 
1737 ^s afterward in 1786, and yet again in 1873. 
The trouble extended over New England, and it is 
curious to observe, between three of the states, the 
same differences of attitude as in the great crisis of 



14 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

1 786. In Connecticut the advocates of paper money 
made but little headway. In 1709 and 171 3 bills of 
credit were issued, but in such small amount and with 
such judicious and stringent measures for redemption 
that the depreciation was but slight, and specie pay- 
ments were resumed with little difficulty. In Rhode 
Island, on the other hand, rag money won an easy 
victory, and the resulting demoralization lasted through 
the century, until after the adoption of the Federal 
Constitution. In Massachusetts parties were more 
evenly divided, but whereas in 1786 the advocates of 
paper were in the minority, in 1737 they had a decided 
majority. They were the popular party, and especially 
so after their policy had led to complaints from British 
merchants trading with Massachusetts, until the royal 
governor, Jonathan Belcher, was ordered by the Lords 
of Trade to veto any further issue of bills of credit. 
A quarrel ensued between Belcher and his legislature, 
and as the governor proved inexorable, wildcat bank- 
ing schemes were devised to meet the emergency. 
The agitation was coming to a crisis when Hutchin- 
son took his seat in the House. Upon all financial 
questions he had a remarkably clear head, and there 
was nothing of the demagogue about him. He would 
not palter with a question of public policy, or seek to 
hide his opinions in order to curry favour with the 
people. He was a man to whom strong convictions 
and dauntless courage had come by inheritance, and 
as his great-grandfather Edward had stoutly opposed 
the persecution of the Quakers, so now the great- 
grandson opposed the paper money delusion with 
untiring zeal. His conduct was the more noteworthy 
in that representatives were at that time in Massachu- 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 1 5 

setts regarded as mere deputies, in duty bound to give 
voice to the wishes or whims of the voters that sent 
them to the legislature. The liberty accorded to them 
of using their own judgment was narrow indeed. In 
spite of his independence, Hutchinson was reelected 
in 1738; but soon afterward in town meeting a set of 
instructions were reported, enjoining it upon the rep- 
resentatives of Boston to vote for the further emission 
of paper. This measure was intended to curb the 
refractory young man, but it only called him at once 
to his feet with a powerful speech, in which he de- 
nounced the instructions as foolish and wicked, and 
ended by flatly refusing to obey them. Indignant 
murmurs ran about the room, and one wrathful voice 
shouted, " Choose another representative, Mr. Mod- 
erator ! " But this was too silly ; it was not for the 
presiding officer of a town meeting to seat or unseat 
representatives. There was no help for it until next 
year, when Hutchinson, who had been as good as his 
word, was defeated at the polls. About this time a 
typhoid fever struck him down, and for several weeks 
he was at death's door. He had three very eminent 
physicians, either of whom might have sat for the 
portrait of Dr. Sangrado, but by dint of an ample 
inheritance of vitality he withstood both drugs and 
disease; and presently, taking counsel of a sensible 
friend, threw physic to the dogs, and recovered strength 
by means of a judicious diet and horseback rides in 
the country. One of the doctors lost his temper and 
stormed about empirics and quacks ; the others showed 
more candour. When Hutchinson found himself able 
again to attend to business, the general confidence in 
his uprightness and ability prevailed over the dislike 



1 6 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

of his policy, and he was again chosen representa- 
tive. 

In this year, 1 740, there was an outburst of excitement 
in Boston not unlike those that ushered in the Revo- 
lutionary War. Of the wildcat banking schemes, two 
were especially prominent. The one known as the 
" Specie Bank " undertook to issue £1 10,000 in promis- 
sory notes, to be redeemed at the end of fifteen years 
in silver at 20 s. per ounce ; but it was not altogether 
clear from what quarter this desirable silver was to 
come. There is something pathetic about these per- 
sistently recurring popular fancies, based on a still 
surviving faith in that old Norse deity to which our 
heathen forefathers did reverence as the god Wish! 
The rival scheme, known as the " Land Bank," under- 
took to issue ^150,000 in promissory notes, redeemable 
at the end of twenty years in manufactures or produce. 
There were about eight hundred stock-holders, or part- 
ners. Each partner mortgaged his house or farm to 
the company, and in return for this security borrowed 
the company's notes at three per cent interest. He 
was to pay each year not only the interest, but 
one-twentieth part of the principal ; and payment 
might be made either in the same notes or else in 
merchandise at rates assigned by the directors of the 
company.^ The exploit of " basing " a currency on 
nothing and " floating " it in the air was never more 
boldly attempted. As a means of transacting business 
in a commercial society, a note payable in another 
note, or in whatever commodity might after twenty 
years happen to be cheapest, must have been a device 
of scarcely less efficiency than the far-famed philoso- 
pher's stone. A man who sold one hundred bushels 

1 Palfrey, IV. 550; Sumner, "American Currency," 29. 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 1 7 

of wheat for such a note would have such a precise 
knowledge of how much it was going to be worth to 
him ! But in financial matters, where the wish is so 
apt to father the thought, there seems to be no delu- 
sion too gross to find supporters. By 1 740 the Land 
Bank and the Specie Bank had both been put into 
operation, in spite of Governor Belcher, who dissolved 
the assembly, cashiered colonels, disbenched justices, 
and turned out office-holders to right and left, for the 
offence of receiving and passing the notes ; and pres- 
ently a flagrant political issue was raised. Finding 
that paper professing to represent at least ;^5o,ooo 
had been issued by the Land Bank, the governor 
appealed to Parliament for help, and in this he was 
upheld by some of the best men in Massachusetts. 
This was in Walpole's time, and his Parliaments 
handled American affairs more delicately than those 
of George III.; it happened that a new statute ex- 
pressly for this occasion was not needed. Twenty 
years before, upon the collapse of the famous South 
Sea Bubble, an act had been passed forbidding the 
incorporation of joint stock companies with more than 
six partners. Parliament now simply declared that 
this act was always of force in the colonies as well as 
in Great Britain. The two Massachusetts companies 
were thus abruptly compelled to wind up their affairs 
and redeem their scrip ; and as the partners were held 
individually liable, they incurred heavy losses, and 
would have been quickly ruined if the claims against 
them had been rigorously pressed. One of the directors 
of the Land Bank, and perhaps the wealthiest of its 
partners, was the elder Samuel Adams, deacon of the 
Old South Church, and one of the justices of the 



1 8 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

peace whom Belcher had displaced. A considerable 
part of his fortune melted away in a moment, so that 
his famous son, who was that summer in the graduat- 
ing class at Harvard, may be said in a certain sense 
to have inherited his quarrel with the British gov- 
ernment. It is interesting, in this connection, to re- 
member how, three years later, as a candidate for the 
master's degree, young Samuel Adams chose as the 
subject of his Latin thesis the question, " Whether it 
be lawful to resist the supreme magistrate if the com- 
monwealth cannot otherwise be preserved ? " and this 
bold question he answered in the affirmative, while the 
new royal governor, Shirley, as guest of the college on 
Commencement Day, sat on the platform and heard 
him. The question as to the authority of Parliament 
over the colonies, which had for a moment attracted 
attention as long ago as 1644, was now more warmly 
agitated. The friends of the Land Bank loudly de- 
nounced the declaratory act of 1 740 as a violation of 
the chartered rights of Massachusetts, and the bitter 
feelings engendered by this affair must unquestionably 
be set down among the causes of the American Revo- 
lution. Hutchinson's conduct at this time was emi- 
nently wise and patriotic. 'On theory he was then, as 
always, a firm believer in the ultimate supremacy of 
Parliament over every part of the British empire. He 
understood better than most Americans of his day 
that the supremacy of the crown was figurative rather 
than real. He believed that if sovereignty over the 
whole did not reside somewhere, the unity of the 
empire was virtually at an end ; and where else could 
such sovereignty reside if not in Parliament ? At the 
same time he shared with many other able and thought- 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 19 

ful men in the fear that, if the protecting hand of Great 
Britain were once removed, the colonies would either 
fall a prey to France or Spain, or else would tear 
themselves to pieces with internecine wars ; and who 
is there that can read the solemn story of the impend- 
ing anarchy from which Washington and Madison 
and Hamilton saved the people of these states in the 
anxious years that followed the victory at Yorktown, 
and then say that such forebodings were wholly un- 
reasonable. I It is easy to be wise after the event ; but 
in distributing the meed of praise and blame, the his- 
torian must bear in mind the aspect of things in the 
times which he seeks to describe, when events, now as 
familiar as our daily bread, were as yet in the darkness 
of the future, undreamed of and improbable. Noth- 
ing can be clearer to-day than that Hutchinson's fun- 
damental theory was wrong. He failed to take in the 
situation, and paid so heavy a penalty for his failure 
that we can well afford to give him due credit for the 
wisdom and good feeling which in some respects he 
did show to an eminent degree. Like Dickinson and 
Burke, he realized that the question of the ultimate 
supremacy of Parliament was a dangerous one to 
insist upon. He saw distinctly the foolishness of 
enlisting such a wholesome feeling as the love of 
self-government in behalf of such a wretched concern 
as the Massachusetts Land Bank ; and he earnestly 
advised Governor Belcher to bide his time, and trust 
in accomplishing its downfall in some other way than 
by a direct appeal to Parliament. Surely Belcher, as 
an ambitious politician, undervalued the counsel of 
this young man of nine and twenty, for the immedi- 
ate result of his violent conduct was his own downfall; 



20 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

to appease the popular indignation, the same British 
government that sustained his pohcy transferred him 
to the inferior position of governor of New Jersey, and 
puj; WilHam Shirley, a man of more tact, in his place. 
But the legacy of distrust and discontent remained. 
This was the first, but not the last, time that serious 
trouble between England and America was brought 
about by disregarding Thomas Hutchinson's advice. 

In the midst of this controversy Hutchinson was 
intrusted by his fellow-citizens with an important 
mission. The boundary line between Massachusetts 
and New Hampshire had for some time been matter 
of dispute, and he was sent over to England to adjust 
the affair. His conduct seems to have been satisfac- 
tory, but his diary gives little information as to the 
details of what he saw and did in the mother country, 
save that homesickness assailed him, and that in all 
his life he could not " remember any joy equal to that 
of meeting his wife again," after an absence of thirteen 
months. On his return he was chosen representative, 
and was annually reelected until 1749. In 1746 and 
the two following years he was Speaker of the House, 
and in this capacity he came once more into conflict 
with popular prejudice, and for a long time to come 
enjoyed a well-earned triumph. By the treaty of Aix- 
la-Chapelle in 1748 the stronghold of Louisburg, which 
New England troops had captured in 1745, was re- 
stored to France in exchange for Madras in Hin- 
dustan. 

In an empire extending over half the globe, it was 
not always easy to reconcile imperial with local inter- 
ests. The people of New England were naturally 
indignant. Their capture of Louisburg was the first 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 21 

event that awakened Europe to the fact that in the 
western hemisphere a new military power had come 
into existence. The place had, moreover, a great 
strategic value in its relations to New England and 
Canada, and we can well understand the wrath that 
greeted the news that this important conquest had 
been bartered away for a heathen city on the other 
side of the globe. To appease the popular indigna- 
tion, Parliament voted that adequate compensation 
should be made for the expense of the capture of 
Louisburg. The sum due to Massachusetts in pursu- 
ance of this vote was ^138,649, which was nearly 
equivalent to the total amount of paper then circulat- 
ing in the colony at its current valuation of one- 
eleventh of its face value. To attempt to raise such a 
currency to par was hopeless. Hutchinson proposed 
in the assembly that Parliament should be asked to 
send over the money in Spanish dollars, which should 
be used to buy up and cancel the paper at eleven for 
one. Whatever paper remained after this summary 
process should be called in and redeemed by direct 
taxation, and any issue of paper currency in future was 
to be forbidden. " This rather caused a smile," says 
the diary, " few apprehending that he was in earnest ; 
but upon his appearing very serious, out of deference 
to him as Speaker, they appointed a committee." 
After a year of hard work, Hutchinson's bill was 
passed, amid the howls and curses of the people of 
Boston. " Such was the infatuation that it was com- 
mon to hear men wish the ship with the silver on 
board might sink in her passage." They wanted no 
money but rag money. At the election in 1 749 Hutch- 
inson was defeated by a great majority, but was imme- 



22 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

diately chosen a member of the council. People soon 
found, to their amazement, that a good hard dollar had 
much greater purchasing power than a scrap of dirty 
paper worth about nine cents ; and it was further 
observed that, when an inferior currency was once out 
of the way, coin would remain in circulation. The 
revival of trade was so steady and so marked that the 
tide of popular feeling turned, and Hutchinson was as 
much praised as he had before been abused. His 
services at this time cannot be rated too highly. To 
his clear insight and determined courage it was largely 
due that Massachusetts was financially able to enter 
upon the Revolutionary War. In 1774 Massachusetts 
was entirely out of debt, and her prosperity contrasted 
strikingly with the poverty-stricken condition of Rhode 
Island, which persisted in its issues of inconvertible 
paper. It was then that the West India trade of 
Massachusetts, a considerable part of which had hith- 
erto been carried on through Newport, was almost 
entirely transferred to Boston and Salem. 

About this time Hutchinson was cherishing an in- 
tention of giving up all mercantile business and deal- 
ing but little more with practical politics. On the 
summit of Milton Hill, seven miles south of Boston, 
in one of the most charming spots in all that neigh- 
bourhood, he had built a fine house, which still stands 
there, though largely reconstructed. Sitting at its 
broad windows, or walking upon the velvet lawn 
under the shade of arching trees, one gets entrancing 
views of the Neponset River, with its meadows far 
below, and of the broad expanse of the harbour 
studded with its islands and cheery with white-winged 
ships. To this earthly paradise, Hutchinson, having 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 23 

passed his fortieth birthday, was hoping soon to retreat 
with his wife and children, there to spend the re- 
mainder of his days in his favourite historical studies 
and in rural pursuits. Like two eminent historians of 
our own time, Mr. Bancroft and Mr. Parkman, he was 
an expert at gardening and had a passion for flowers. 
But it is not so easy to tear oneself away from public 
life. In the spring of 1752, the death of his uncle, 
Edward Hutchinson, left vacant the offices of judge of 
probate and justice of common pleas for the county of 
Suffolk, and the nephew accepted an appointment 
to fill these places. Two years afterward he met with 
an overwhelming affliction in the sudden death of his 
wife, at the age of thirty-seven. For twenty years 
their life had been so happy that the remembrance of 
it kept him ever after from the mere thought of another 
marriage. He now sought relief from sorrow in in- 
creased devotion to public affairs. In that same year, 
1754, he was one of the delegates to the memorable 
Congress at Albany, where he was associated with 
Franklin on the committee for drawing up a plan of 
union for the thirteen colonies. It is pleasant for a 
moment to see these two eminent men working to- 
gether in a friendly spirit, little dreaming of their 
future estrangement. For the conception of the 
famous Albany Plan, Hutchinson gives the credit 
entirely to Franklin. At that time the views of the 
two were in harmony. No one had as yet thought 
seriously of such a thing as separation from the British 
empire. If this sagacious scheme for a federal union 
of the thirteen colonies, with a parliament or grand 
council of their own, a viceroy appointed by the crown, 
and local self-government guaranteed to the people, 



24 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

could have been once put into successful operation, the 
history of the next half-century would have been very 
different from what it was. There would probably 
have been no Stamp Act, no Committees of Corre- 
spondence, no Boston Tea Party, perhaps no Revolu- 
tion. It is idle to pursue such speculations. A 
general acquaintance with history would lead one to 
doubt if, under a federal union thus formed, and ham- 
pered by connection with a remote imperial govern- 
ment, the political career of the American people 
could have been worked out with as much success as 
that which we have actually witnessed. But we need 
not go so far as this, inasmuch as any plan whatever 
for a federal union, in 1754, vvas premature and im- 
practicable. Men like Franklin and Hutchinson 
might see the desirableness of such a thing, but 
people in general did not see it. The time for con- 
structive national politics on this grand scale had not 
arrived ; and probably nothing but hardship would 
have brought it. It is only through pain that higher 
and higher forms of life, whether individual or social, 
are evolved. 

In 1757 Shirley was succeeded in the governorship 
of Massachusetts by Thomas Pownall, and the next 
year Hutchinson was appointed lieutenant-governor. 
Under the manaofement of William Pitt the fortunes 
of the world-wide war against France were now sud- 
denly changed, " We are obliged to ask every day," 
said Horace Walpole, " what new victory there is, for 
fear of losing one." Hutchinson's energy and popu- 
larity made him of great sei"vice in calling out the mili- 
tary resources of Massachusetts, and in these campaigns 
the province began to awaken to a consciousness of 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 25 

its strength. Pownall stayed only till 1760, when he 
was replaced by Francis Bernard, who, soon after- 
ward, on the death of Stephen Sewall, appointed 
Hutchinson chief justice of Massachusetts, much to 
the disgust of the elder James Otis, who desired the 
position and expected to obtain it. In later days 
Hutchinson was charged with greed of office, because 
he was at once judge of probate, member of the 
council, chief justice, and lieutenant-governor. Still 
later the charge of avarice has been thoughtlessly 
added by writers forgetful of the facts that he was 
liberal in money matters, far too rich to be attracted 
by the meagre salaries of these laborious offices, and 
as a scholar somewhat inclined to be miserly of his 
time. The explanation is rather to be found in his 
inheritance of public spirit and rare ability, combined 
with the general favour won by genial manners and 
unblemished purity of life. For twenty years he was 
the popular idol of Massachusetts, and was wanted for 
all sorts of things. There may seem something strange 
in appointing to the chief justiceship a man who had 
not practised at the bar, instead of a lawyer so eminent 
as Otis. But Hutchinson's eight years' service as 
judge of a county court had shown that, along with a 
judicial temper, he possessed an extraordinarily wide 
and accurate knowledge of law ; and when Bernard 
appointed him chief justice he did so at the earnest 
request of several leading members of the bar, headed 
by Jeremiah Gridley, one of the greatest lawyers of 
that age. 

On a December day of 1 760, soon after this appoint- 
ment was made, the news came to Boston that King 
George H. was dead and his youthful grandson had 



26 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

ascended the throne as George III. No one could 
then have dreamed what this announcement portended. 
But soon there followed the news of Pitt's resignation, 
and the next three years saw the abandonment of the 
whole grand policy in support of which British and 
American troops had for the last time stood side by 
side, and its replacement by that domestic struggle for 
supremacy between the king and the Whig families, 
out of which grew some of the immediate causes of 
the American Revolution. In the year 1761 there 
appeared in the horizon the little cloud like unto a 
man's hand which came before the storm. This was 
the famous argument on the writs of assistance en- 
abling revenue officers to enter houses and search for 
smuggled goods. In this case, in which Hutchinson 
presided and Gridley appeared for the crown officers, 
the younger James Otis made the startling and pro- 
phetic speech in which he showed successfully that 
the issue of such writs was contrary to the whole 
spirit of the British constitution. According to the 
letter of the law, however, the case was not so clear. 
Such general search-warrants had been allowed by a 
statute of Charles II., another statute of William III. 
in general terms here granted to revenue officers in 
America like powers to those they possessed in 
England, and neither of these statutes had been re- 
pealed. As to the legality of the writs there was 
room for doubt; and Hutchinson accordingly sus- 
pended judgment until the next term, in order to 
obtain information from England as to the present 
practice there. In accordance with advice from the 
law officers of the crown, the writs were finally granted. 
Here, as in other yet weightier matters which were 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 27 

hereafter to come up for fierce debate, it was becoming 
apparent that the rea' question was concerned with 
something even more fundamental than the interpre- 
tation of the law. The real question was whether 
Americans were bound to obey laws which they had 
no voice in making. An out-and-out issue upon this 
point was something that Hutchinson dreaded as 
anxiously as Clay and Calhoun, in their different ways, 
dreaded an out-and-out issue upon the slavery question. 
He earnestly deprecated any action of Parliament 
which should encroach upon American self-govern- 
ment ; and by the same token he frowned upon such 
action on the part of his fellow-citizens as might irritate 
Parliament, and provoke it into asserting its power. 
Should the issue be raised, he felt that the choice was 
between anarchy and submission to Parliament, and 
that the very love which he bore to Massachusetts 
must urge him to a course that was likely to deprive 
him of the esteem of valued friends, and heap cruel 
imputations upon his character and motives. Such 
questions of conflicting allegiance have no pity for 
men in high positions. They were fraught with 
sorrow to Thomas Hutchinson as to Robert Lee, and 
many another noble and tender soul. 

It was natural, therefore, that when the Grenville 
ministry began to talk about a stamp act, Hutchinson 
should have done his best to dissuade them from such 
a rash measure. Here, as before, if his advice had 
been taken, much trouble might have been avoided. 
As a high public official, however, he could not with 
propriety blazon forth what he was doing, and many 
people misunderstood him. He condemned the re- 
sistance which was beginning to organize itself under 



28 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

the leadership of Samuel Adams, as tending inevita- 
bly toward counter-resistance and strife. Such an 
attitude was liable to be interpreted as indicating 
tacit approval of the Stamp Act. At this juncture 
an unfortunate incident served to direct upon him 
the rage of the rough populace that swarmed about 
the wharves and waterside taverns of the busy sea- 
port. The enforcement of the Navigation Acts had 
already made much trouble in Boston, and in more 
than one instance warehouse doors had been barri- 
caded and the officers successfully defied. Governor 
Bernard had become very unpopular through his zeal 
in promoting seizures for illicit trade, which he was 
supposed to have made quite profitable by his share 
in the forfeitures. In the ordinary course of business 
concerning these matters, depositions were made be- 
fore Chief Justice Hutchinson, and attested by him. 
In Bernard's reports to the Lords of Trade, such 
depositions were sometimes sent over to London as 
evidence of the state of affairs, and were placed on 
file at the Plantation Office. There it happened that 
Briggs Hallowell, a Boston merchant, saw some of 
these documents in which John Rowe and others of 
his fellow-citizens were mentioned by name as smug- 
glers. Reports of this reached Boston in the summer 
of 1765, on the very eve of the Stamp Act riots. 

The house in which Hutchinson still continued to 
dwell wdien in town was his father's home, where he 
had been born. It stood between Garden Court and 
Hanover Street, next to the house of Sir Harry Frank- 
land, in a neighbourhood from which the glory has 
long since departed. At that time it was probably 
the noblest dwelling-house in America, for along with 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 29 

its rich furnishings and works of art it contained the 
superb library which its owner had for thirty years 
been collecting, and which included many precious 
manuscripts illustrating our early history, — docu- 
ments for a sight of which to-day the historical stu- 
dent would deem their weight in diamonds a cheap 
price. On the oaken desk which stood amid these 
crowded shelves the ink was hardly dry upon the last 
pages of the second volume of that " History of Massa- 
chusetts " which remains to-day one of the most admi- 
rable histories ever written by an American. The 
first volume, bringing the story down to the accession 
of William III., was published in 1764; the second, 
continuing the narrative to 1 750, was now about to go 
to press, when riot and confusion burst in upon the 
scene. On the 14th of August the Sons of Liberty 
paraded through the streets, in just and rightful ex- 
pression of indignation at the Stamp Act. Nothing 
violent was done, though the beams of a house just 
going up, and supposed to be intended for a stamp 
office, were pulled down and used for a bonfire. By 
the next night more disreputable elements were at 
work. A mob surrounded Hutchinson's house, and 
shouted to him to come out and deny, if he could, 
that he had advised and abetted the Stamp Act. 
But this he refused to do. It was not for him to 
yield to a demand made in such a spirit. Upon com- 
pulsion, he, like Gabriel Varden, would do nothing. 
An aged merchant hereupon harangued the crowd, 
and assured them that they were quite in the wrong; 
Mr. Hutchinson disapproved the Stamp Act, and was 
in no wise responsible for it. So for that night all 
passed quietly, but during the next week vague, ill- 



30 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

understood rumours from London wrought their effect 
upon the mob. On the night of the 26th a bonfire in 
King Street gathered a crowd together. First they 
broke into the cellars of the comptroller of customs, 
and drank freely from the rum and brandy casks 
stored there. Then a fury for punishing informers 
seized them, and they rushed to the chief justice's 
house. A few blows with broadaxes split the doors 
and window-shutters, and the howling, cursing rabble 
swarmed in. Their approach had been heard some 
minutes before, and Hutchinson had told his children 
to flee ; but his eldest daughter refused to go without 
him, and while she was expostulating with him, the 
doors were broken in. Carrying her in his arms, he 
fled across the garden to the house of his brother-in- 
law, the Rev. Samuel Mather, leaving the mob in 
full possession. Pictures were cut to pieces, mirrors 
smashed, wearing apparel and silver stolen, and price- 
less books and manuscripts flung into the street. The 
halts made from time to time in the well-stocked wine- 
bins served to keep up and enhance the fury, until 
before daybreak even the partition walls had been 
partly torn down, and great breaches had been hacked 
in the brickwork. By sunrise the crowd had dis- 
persed, and friendly hands had begun searching for 
the treasures of the ruined library. The manuscript 
of the second volume of the history, scattered hither 
and thither, and drenched in a midnight shower, was 
picked up and carefully put together by the Rev. 
Andrew Eliot, so that the author found little diflficulty 
in restoring it, and it was published two years later. 

The next morning, before Governor Bernard could 
summon the council, a huge town meeting in Faneuil 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 3 1 

Hall declared by a unanimous vote its abhorrence of 
the shameful work of the night. It was the opening- 
day of the session of court, and the chief justice, whose 
wardrobe had perished, came to the bench in his loose- 
gown, and with the quiet dignity that never deserted 
him pointed out to the crowded audience the wicked- 
ness of the misunderstanding of which he had been 
made the victim. Court adjourned till order could be 
restored. Town meetings throughout Massachusetts 
condemned the mob. Several ringleaders were arrested 
and sent to jail, but another mob released them. The 
disorder was not fully abated until the 9th of Septem- 
ber, when news came from England that the Grenville 
ministry had fallen. The advent of Lord Rocking- 
ham as prime minister gave hope that the Stamp Act 
policy would be reconsidered, and for two years quiet 
was restored in America. A bill for the relief of per- 
sons who had suffered from the riots was passed by 
the Massachusetts assembly, and Hutchinson's dam- 
ages were repaired, so far as might be, in money. The 
loss of materials for the student of American history 
was something that could never be repaired. 

In the year of the Stamp Act Samuel Adams was 
chosen a member of the legislature. The exclusion 
of crown officers from a seat in either branch of that 
body had for some time been one of his favourite ideas, 
and in 1 766 he so far succeeded in realizing it that 
Hutchinson, with four others, failed to be elected to 
the council. The last two years of Bernard's admin- 
istration, 1 768 and 1 769, were full of strife and bitter- 
ness. The news of Charles Townshend's measures 
led to the famous resolutions of 1768 and the circular 
letter inviting the other colonies to resistance. Then 



32 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

came the demand from the ministry that the circular 
letter should be rescinded, to which the Massachusetts 
assembly replied with a flat refusal, and was forthwith 
turned out of doors by the governor. Then, in order 
to catch Samuel Adams and carry him to England for 
trial, there was the revival of a half-forgotten act of 
Henry VIII., about treason committed beyond sea. 
The two regiments which were landed in Boston in 
the autumn of 1 768 came at Bernard's solicitation, to 
aid the crown officers in preserving order. Such an 
event as the sacking of Hutchinson's house went far 
toward creating an impression in England that such 
assistance was necessary. The intention of the gov- 
ernment in sending the troops was no doubt innocent 
enough ; but it would have been hard to hit upon a 
more dangerous measure, or one revealing a more 
hopeless ignorance of the American character. It 
could not be regarded otherwise than as a threat, and 
it put Great Britain into somewhat the attitude of a 
man who, in the course of an argument with his friend, 
suddenly draws a pistol. An intelligent and disinter- 
ested government might have asked itself the question 
whether it were a wise policy to keep up an odious 
revenue law that in such an orderly town as Boston 
made it necessary to introduce soldiers to prevent dis- 
order. But not only was the government neither in- 
telligent nor disinterested, but it was entirely natural 
to argue that a town whose magistrates could not pre- 
vent the sacking of private houses did not deserve 
to be called an orderly town. As for Hutchinson 
himself, he would have been more than human if such 
considerations had not coloured his own view of the 
case, although the serenity and sweetness of temper 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS S3 

with which, in his history, as also in his private diary, 
he speaks of his personal hardships, are very remark- 
able. The pages of these charming books show the 
thoroughbred Christian gentleman. But as a states- 
man he was far from reading the temper of the people 
correctly. He htew that in the violence which touched 
him so nearly the sympathy of the people was not with 
the rioters. He /e// that all the troubles were due to 
the unreasonable obstinacy of a few such men as James 
Otis and Samuel Adams ; and that if these men could 
be defeated, the general sense of the people would be 
in favour of peace and quiet. In this opinion he mis- 
conceived the facts of the situation very much as they 
are misconceived to-day by such well-meaning British 
writers as Mr. Lecky and Mr. Goldwin Smith. With 
all their fairness toward America, these writers are 
still blind to the fact that the issues raised by George 
ni. and his ministers — in the Stamp Act of 1765, in 
the Townshend acts of 1767, in the measures concern- 
ing the salaries of crown officers in 1772, and finally 
in the vindictive acts of 1774 after the Boston Tea 
Party — were one and all of them such issues as the 
Americans could not for a moment accept without 
shamefully abandoning the principles of free govern- 
ment for which the whole English race has been man- 
fully striving since the days of Magna Charta. If 
British historians, sincerely desirous of doing justice 
to America, find it hard to understand these things 
to-day, perhaps it was not strange that some able men 
like Hutchinson did not understand them at a time 
when the baleful policy and selfish aims of George III. 
were still dimly viewed through the mists of contem- 
porary prejudice and passion. Hutchinson's own 



34 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

views were thus expressed in a private letter to a 
friend in Dublin, early in 1772, " It is not likely 
that the American colonies will remain part of the 
British dominion another century, but while they do 
remain, the supreme absolute legislative power must 
remain entire, to be exercised upon the colonies so 
far as is necessary for the maintenance of its own 
authority and the general weal of the empire, and no 
farther." This was moderately expressed ; probably at 
that moment neither Dickinson nor Franklin would 
have taken serious exception to it. Yet the argument 
could not be pushed without involving the surrender 
of the American cause. It does not appear that 
Hutchinson was anxious to push it, or that he courted 
the position of chief upholder of Toryism in America; 
but the attitude of mind that went naturally along 
with his official position could hardly fail to drive him 
in this direction. In the summer of 1769 Governor 
Bernard was recalled to England, to appease the people 
of Massachusetts, while his own feelings were assuaged 
with a baronetcy. Before his ship had weighed anchor 
in the harbour, the sound of clanging bells and boom- 
ing cannon told him of the fierce rejoicings over his 
departure. The administration of affairs was left in 
the hands of Hutchinson as lieutenant-governor, and 
it was not long before the course of events was such 
as to show, with vivid and startling suddenness, the 
false position into which he was drifting. In the fatal 
squabble between soldiers and townspeople on that 
memorable moonlit evening in March, 1770, he showed 
vigour and discretion, and but for his prompt arrest 
of the offending soldiers the affair might have grown 
into something which it would have been no misnomer 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 35 

to call a " massacre." But next morning, when he 
looked out from the window of the town house, and 
saw the surging crowd of people in King Street, on 
their way from Faneuil Hall to the Old South Church, 
and when he exclaimed that their spirit seemed to be 
as high as that of their ancestors when they rose 
against Andros, one cannot but wonder if his thoughts 
did not go back for a moment to the winter day when 
as a little child he had stood by the grave of the grand- 
father who had stoutly opposed that agent of tyranny. 
Did it seem quite right for the grandson, with whatso- 
ever honest intent, to be standing in Andros's place ? 
A few hours later, when Samuel Adams, for the second 
time that day, came into the council chamber, with the 
final message from the people, and with uplifted finger 
solemnly commanded Hutchinson to remove all sol- 
diery from Boston, the king's representative obeyed. 
That his knees trembled and his cheeks grew pale, 
as Adams afterward told, we may well believe. Not 
from fear, however, but more likely from a sudden 
sickening sense of the odium of his position. Not 
long afterward he wrote to London, asking to be re- 
lieved of all further share in the work of administration. 
But before the letter was received his commission as 
royal governor of Massachusetts had been drawn up. 
Lord North was at this time earnest in the wish to 
pursue a conciliatory policy, and Hutchinson was 
appointed governor because it was supposed that the 
people would prefer his administration. Indeed, except 
for the unfortunate affray in King Street, the departure 
of Bernard already seemed to have done much to clear 
the air. After the troops had been sent out to the 
Castle, there was a general sense of relief, and many 



36 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

people entertained hopes that the troubles were over. 
In reply to Hutchinson's letter, the ministry told him 
to take his own time to consider whether or not he 
would accept the appointment ; and it was during this 
lull in the storm, toward the end of 1770, that he de- 
cided to accept it. He might well believe that under 
his own management of affairs fewer occasions for dis- 
sension would arise. When the storm arose again, it 
burst from a quarter where no one would have looked 
for it. 

For the two years following the so-called " Boston 
Massacre," Hutchinson's administration was compara- 
tively quiet. In the summer of 1772 the excitement 
again rose to fever heat, over the royal order that the 
salaries of the judges should henceforth be paid by 
the crown. This measure, striking directly at the 
independence of the judiciary, led Samuel Adams to 
the revolutionary step of organizing the famous Com- 
mittees of Correspondence. Hutchinson at first under- 
estimated the importance of this step, but presently, 
taking alarm at the progress which resistance to the 
government was making, he tried to check it by a 
sober appeal to reason. In January, 1773, he sent a 
message to the legislature, containing an elaborate and 
masterly statement of the doctrine of the supremacy 
of Parliament over the whole British empire. It was 
a document of prodigious learning and written in 
excellent temper. Its knowledge of law was worthy 
of Lord Mansfield, who expressed the warmest admi- 
ration for it. It was widely read on both sides of the 
Atlantic, and Whigs as well as Tories admitted its 
power. But Hutchinson's great antagonist was equal 
to the occasion. Never did the acuteness, the strong 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 37 

sense, and the dialectic skill of Samuel Adams show 
to better advantage than in the reply which he drew 
up for the legislature. Its force was such as to make 
the governor doubt whether he had done wisely, after 
all, in opening an argument on the subject. He sent 
in an elaborate rejoinder, to which Adams again 
replied, and for some time the controversy was sus- 
tained with dignity on both sides. Whatever opinions 
were held as to the merits of the arguments, the gov- 
ernor certainly gained in personal popularity during 
the winter, and still more in the spring, when he met 
the governor of New York at Hartford, and succeeded 
in adjusting the long-disputed boundary line between 
New York and Massachusetts, to the entire satisfac- 
tion of the latter colony. 

This was the last moment of popular favour that 
Hutchinson was ever to know. The skein of events 
that were to compass his downfall had already unwound 
itself in London. For several years a private and 
unofficial correspondence had been kept up between 
Hutchinson and other officers of the crown in Massa- 
chusetts, on the one hand, and Thomas Whately, who 
had formerly been private secretary to George Grenville, 
on the other. Whately was a friend to America, and 
disapproved of the king's policy. Besides Hutchinson, 
the chief writers were his brother-in-law, Andrew 
Oliver, who was now associated with him as lieutenant- 
governor, and Charles Paxton, one of the revenue 
officers in Boston. In these letters Hutchinson freely 
commented on the policy of Samuel Adams and other 
popular leaders as seditious in tendency; he doubted 
if it were practicable for a colony removed by three 
thousand miles of ocean to enjoy all the liberties of 



38 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

the mother country without severing its connection 
with her; and he had therefore reluctantly come to 
the conclusion that Massachusetts must submit to " an 
abridgment of what are called English liberties." In 
this there was nothing that he had not said again and 
again in public, and amply explained in his famous 
message to the assembly. But Oliver went farther, 
and urged that judges and other crown officers should 
have fixed salaries assigned and paid by the crown, so 
as to become independent of popular favour. Paxton 
enlarged upon the turbulence of the people of Boston, 
and thought two or three regiments needful for pre- 
serving order. The letters were written independently 
on different occasions, and the suggestions were 
doubtless made in perfect good faith. In June, 1772, 
Thomas Whately died, and all his papers passed into 
the custody of William, his brother and executor. In 
the following December, before William Whately had 
opened or looked over the packet of letters from 
Massachusetts, it was found that they had been pur- 
loined by some person unknown. It is not certain 
that the letters had ever really passed into William 
Whately 's hands. They may have been left lying in 
some place where they may have attracted the notice 
of some curious busybody, who forthwith laid hands 
upon them. This has never been satisfactorily cleared 
up. At all events they were carried to Dr. Franklin, as 
containing political intelligence that might prove im- 
portant. Franklin was then the agent at the British 
court, representing Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New 
Jersey, and Georgia. The dispute over the salaries of 
the judges was then raging in Massachusetts. The 
judges had been threatened with impeachment should 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 39 

they dare to receive a penny from the royal treasury, 
and at their head was Andrew OHver's younger brother 
Peter, chief justice of Massachusetts. As agent for 
the colony, Franklin felt it his duty to give information 
of the contents of the letters now laid before him. 
Although they purported to be merely a private corre- 
spondence, it appeared to him that they were written 
by public officers to a person in public station, on 
public affairs, and intended to procure public measures ; 
their tendency, he thought, was to incense the mother 
country against her colonies. Franklin was doubtless 
mistaken in this, but he felt as Walsingham might 
have felt on suddenly discovering, in private and con- 
fidential papers, the clew to some popish plot against 
the life of Queen Elizabeth. From the person who 
brought him the letters he got permission to send 
them to Massachusetts, on condition that they should 
be shown only to a few people in authority, that they 
should not be copied or printed, that they should 
presently be returned, and that the name of the per- 
son from whom they were obtained should never be 
disclosed. This last condition was thoroughly ful- 
filled. The others must have been felt to be mainly a 
matter of form; it was obvious that, though they 
might be literally complied with, their spirit would 
inevitably be violated. The letters were sent to the 
proper person, Thomas Gushing, speaker of the Massa- 
chusetts assembly, and he showed them to Hancock, 
Hawley, and the two Adamses. To these gentlemen 
it could have been no new dis.covery that Hutchinson 
and Oliver held such opinions as were expressed in 
the letters ; but the documents seemed to furnish 
tangible proof of what had long been vaguely sur- 



40 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

mised, that the governor and his lieutenant were plot- 
ting against the liberties of Massachusetts. They 
were soon talked about at every town meeting and on 
every street corner. The assembly twitted Hutchin- 
son with them, and asked for copies of these and other 
such papers as he might see fit to communicate. He 
replied, somewhat sarcastically, " If you desire copies 
with a view to make them public, the originals are 
more proper for the purpose than any copies." Mis- 
taken as Hutchinson's policy was, his conscience 
acquitted him of any treasonable purpose, and he must 
naturally have preferred to have people judge him by 
what he had really written, rather than by vague and 
distorted rumours. His reply was taken as sufficient 
warrant for printing the letters, and they were soon 
in the possession of every reader in England or 
America who could afford sixpence for a political 
tract. On the other side of the Atlantic they aroused 
as much excitement as on this, and William Whately 
became concerned to know who could have stolen the 
letters. On very slight evidence he charged a Mr. 
Temple with the theft, and a duel ensued, in which 
Whately was dangerously wounded. Hearing of this 
affair, Franklin published a card, in which he avowed 
his own share in the transaction, and in a measure 
screened everybody else by drawing the full torrent of 
wrath and abuse upon himself. All the ill-suppressed 
spleen of the king's friends was at once discharged 
upon him. 

Meanwhile in Massachusetts the excitement was 
furious. The autumn of 1773 had arrived, and with 
it Lord Dartmouth's tea ships, and Hutchinson was 
brought into an attitude of hostility to the people such 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 41 

as he could not have foreseen when he accepted the 
governorship. It was mainly his stubborn courage 
that kept the consignees of the tea from resigning 
their commissions in Boston, as the consignees in 
New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston had done. 
This made Boston the battle-ground upon which the 
tea question was to end in a flat defiance of the British 
government. Hutchinson tried to avoid the difficulty 
by advising the consignees to order the vessels on 
their arrival to anchor below the Castle, so that if it 
should seem best not to land the tea they might go to 
sea again. When the first ship arrived, she was 
anchored accordingly, but it happened that she had 
other goods on board which some merchants in town 
were needing, and a committee, headed by Samuel 
Adams, ordered the captain to bring his ship to dock, 
in order to land these goods. This brought the vessel 
within the jurisdiction of the custom-house, and when 
the officers refused to give her a clearance until she 
had landed the tea also, there was no way of getting 
her out to sea without a pass from the governor. But 
Hutchinson felt that granting a pass for a ship until 
she had been duly cleared at the custom-house would 
be a violation of his oath of office. The situation was 
thus a complete deadlock, and for the popular party 
there was no way out except in the destruction of the 
tea. 

The antagonism between governor and people, which 
thus culminated in the first great crisis of the American 
Revolution, had been immeasurably enhanced by the 
adroit use which had been made of the Whately letters. 
One cannot, in this particular, view the conduct of 
Samuel Adams and his friends with entire approval. 



42 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

As Dr. Ellis has well said, it was a case of " the most 
vehement possible cry with the slightest possible 
amount of wool." Strong emphasis was laid upon the 
phrase " abridgment of what are called English liber- 
ties," and serious injustice was done by tearing it from 
its context. Nothing could show this more clearly 
than the governor's own frank and manly statement : 
" I differ in my principles from the present leaders of 
the people. ... I think that by the constitution of 
the colonies the Parliament has a supreme authority 
over them. I have nevertheless always been an advo- 
cate for as large a power of legislation within each 
colony as can consist with a supreme control. I have 
declared against a forcible opposition to the execution 
of acts of Parliament which have laid taxes on the 
people of America; I have, notwithstanding, ever 
wished that such acts might not be made as the 
Stamp Act in particular. I have done everything in 
my power that they might be repealed. I do not see 
how the people in the colonies can enjoy every liberty 
which the people in England enjoy, because in Eng- 
land every man may be represented in Parliament 
. . . ; but in the colonies, the people, I conceive, can- 
not have representatives in Parliament to any advan- 
tage. It gives me pain when I think it must be so. 
I wish also that we may enjoy every privilege of an 
Englishman which our remote situation will admit of. 
These are sentiments which I have without reserve 
declared among my private friends, in my speeches 
and messages to the General Court, in my correspond- 
ence with the ministers of state, and I have published 
them to the world in my history ; and yet I have 
been declared an enemy and a traitor to my country 



i.AST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 43 

because in my private letters I have discovered the 
same sentiments, for everything else asserted to be 
contained in those letters (I mean of mine) unfriendly 
to the country, I must deny as altogether groundless 
and false." By this last qualification the governor 
shows himself aware of the cruel injustice wrought in 
holding him responsible for everything that Paxton 
and Oliver had said. The letters, when published to- 
gether in a single pamphlet, were read as containing 
from first to last the sentiments of Hutchinson. In 
the popular excitement the fact that they were not all 
his letters was lost sight of; and by a wild leap of 
inference not uncommon in such cases, people soon 
reached the conclusion that the conduct of the British 
government for the past ten years had been secretly 
instigated by him ; that he was to blame for the Stamp 
Act, the sending of troops to Boston, the tea measures, 
and everything. It was this misunderstanding that 
heaped upon Hutchinson's name the load of oppro- 
brium which it has had to carry for a hundred years. 
His mistaken political attitude would not of itself have 
sufficed to call forth such intense bitterness of feeling. 
The erroneousness of his policy is even clearer to us 
than to his contemporaries, for with the lapse of time 
it has been more and more completely refuted by the 
unanswerable logic of events. But we can also see 
how grievously he was misjudged, since we know that 
he was not the underhanded schemer that men sup- 
posed him to be. Never has there been a more 
memorable illustration of the wrong and suffering that 
is apt to be wrought in all directions in a period of 
revolutionary excitement than the fact that during the 
autumn of 1773 one of the purest and most high- 



44 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

minded citizens of Massachusetts was regarded by so 
many other pure and high-minded citizens as Httle 
better than a traitor. Acting upon this behef the 
assembly, sometime before the crisis of the Tea 
Party, had already despatched a memorial across the 
ocean, beseeching his Majesty to remove Governor 
Hutchinson and Lieutenant-governor Oliver from 
office. 

In January, 1774, the petition was laid before the 
privy council, in the presence of a large and brilliant 
gathering of spectators. Never before had so many 
lords been seen in that chamber at one time. The 
Archbishop of Canterbury was there, and Lord Shel- 
burne, and Edmund Burke ; and there, too, were to 
be seen the illustrious Dr. Priestley and youthful Jer- 
emy Bentham. At the head of the table sat the Lord 
President Gower, and in the chimney corner stood an 
old man of eight and sixty, with spectacles and flow- 
ing wig, dressed in a suit of dark Manchester velvet. 
This was Dr. Franklin, to whose part it fell, as agent 
for the Massachusetts assembly, to present its petition. 
The news of the Boston Tea Party had just arrived 
in London, and people's wrath waxed hot against the 
Americans. The solicitor-general, David Wedder- 
burn, instead of discussing the petition on its merits, 
broke out with a scurrilous invective against Frank- 
lin, whom he accused, if not of actually stealing the 
Whately letters, at least of basely meddling with pri- 
vate correspondence from the lowest of motives, to 
get Hutchinson dismissed from office and secure for 
himself the governorship of Massachusetts. Such a 
man, said Wedderburn, has forfeited forever the re- 
spect of his fellow-creatures, and should never dare 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 45 

again to show his face in society, — this man of letters, 
forsooth ! " a man of three letters." At this obvious 
allusion to the old Roman slang expression preserved 
in Plautus, where "a man of three letters" is f-u-r, a 
thief, there were loud cries of " Hear, hear ! " Of the 
members of government present, Lord North alone 
preserved his unfailing decorum ; the others laughed 
and applauded, while Franklin stood as unmoved as 
the moon at the baying of dogs. His conduct had, 
perhaps, been hardly defensible, and it had probably 
worked more harm than good, but his conscience was 
certainly quite clear ; and he could not but despise the 
snarls of such a cur as Wedderburn, whom the king, 
while fain to use him as a tool, felt free to call the big- 
gest knave in the realm. Ralph Izard, the hot-blooded 
South Carolinian, who listened to the insulting speech, 
afterward declared that if it had been aimed at him, 
he would have answered on the spot with a challenge. 
Lord Shelburne wrote to Lord Chatham that the in- 
decency of the affair was such as would have disgraced 
an ordinary election contest. Before the meeting was 
adjourned, Wedderburn stepped up to say good-morn- 
ing to Dr. Priestley; but the great man of science, 
kindest and most gentle of mortals, indignantly turned 
his back. Ah, quoth Immanuel Kant, in his study at 
distant Konigsberg, as he smoked his evening pipe 
and listened to the story, we have heard before how 
Prometheus, who brought fire from heaven, was teased 
by an unclean bird. The affair ended as might have 
been foreseen. The Massachusetts petition was not 
simply rejected, but condemned as scandalous; and 
next day Franklin was dismissed from his office of 
postmaster-general for America. 



46 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

Events, however, soon brought about practically 
Hutchinson's removal. When in April Parliament 
made up its mind, in retaliation for the Tea Party, to 
annul the charter of Massachusetts and starve the 
town of Boston into submission, it was clear that such 
a man as Hutchinson would not serve the purpose. 
For such measures of martial law a soldier was likely 
to be needed, and the work was intrusted to Thomas 
Gage. This change afforded Hutchinson the oppor- 
tunity he had for some time desired, of going to Eng- 
land in the hope of doing something toward putting 
an end to these dreadful quarrels and misunderstand- 
ings. Of the retaliatory measures he profoundly dis- 
approved, and could he but meet the king face to face, 
he hoped that his plea for Massachusetts might prove 
not ineffectual. When on the morning of the first of 
June, 1774, he left his charming home in Milton, with- 
out the slightest premonition that he was never to see 
it again, it was in the spirit of a peacemaker that he 
embarked for England, but there were many who saw 
in it the flight of a renegade. It was not in a moment, 
however, that this view prevailed. In spite of all the 
bitter conflict and misunderstanding that had come to 
pass, a character so noble as Hutchinson's could not 
all at once lose its hold upon honest men and women 
who had known him for years in the numberless little 
details of life that do not make a figure in political 
history. The governor's heart was cheered, even if 
his forebodings were not quieted, by formal addresses 
from some of the leading townsmen of Milton and 
Boston, in which his many services to the common- 
wealth received their full meed of affectionate acknow- 
ledgment. But events were now moving fast, and 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 47 

relations among men were to be whirled hither and 
thither as in a cyclone. Most of these addressers were 
soon to be judged as Tories and condemned to outer 
darkness. Those of us who remember the four years 
following i860, remember how lax men's memories 
are of some things, how tenacious of others. So the 
guns of Lexington and Bunker Hill soon left little of 
Hutchinson's reputation standing, save that which the 
last two years had brought him. The house at Milton 
was used as barracks for soldiers ; the portrait of its 
owner, now in the possession of the Massachusetts 
Historical Society, was slashed and torn by bayonets ; 
all his accessible property was confiscated, and his 
best coach was sent over to Cambridge for the use of 
General Washington. Even so late as 1774 a little 
town in the highlands of Worcester County was incor- 
porated under the name of Hutchinson, but two years 
later, on its earnest petition, the legislature allowed it 
to call itself after the eloquent Colonel Barre, who 
had in Parliament so warmly defended the Americans. 
Hutchinson Street in Boston, leading down to the 
wharf which had witnessed the smashing of the tea- 
chests, was rechristened as Pearl Street. Even the 
school in Bennet Street lost the name of its founder, 
and is known to-day as the Eliot school. 

No sooner had Hutchinson arrived at his hotel in 
London, than Lord Dartmouth came for him and hur- 
ried him off to an interview with the king, without 
waiting for him to change his clothes. The conversa- 
tion, as preserved in the diary, is interesting to read. 
Neither king, minister, nor governor had the faintest 
glimmer of prevision as to the course which events 
were about to take. Hutchinson was right, however, 



48 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

in feeling uneasy about the vindictive acts of April, 
and expressed, in guarded but emphatic terms, his dis- 
approval of them and his wish that they might be 
repealed; but the king and Dartmouth felt sure that 
Gage would soon mend matters so that there would 
be no need for further harshness, and it was intended 
that Hutchinson should presently return to Boston 
and resume the office of governor. The king did not 
regard him as superseded by Gage, and it is accord- 
ingly right to call Thomas Hutchinson the last royal 
governor of Massachusetts. A few weeks later the 
king offered him a baronetcy, which he refused. He 
cared little for such honours or emoluments as Eng- 
land could give him. His heart was in Massachusetts. 
Better a farmhouse there, he said, than the finest palace 
in the Old World. Life in London was, nevertheless, 
made pleasant for him by the society of the most cul- 
tivated and interesting people, and he was everywhere 
treated with the highest consideration. He now de- 
voted his working hours to the third volume of his 
history, covering the period from 1750 to 1774. This 
was, from the nature of the case, largely a narrative of 
personal experience, and in view of what that experi- 
ence had been, its fairness and good temper are simply 
astonishing. The volume remained in manuscript until 
1828, when it was published in London by one of the 
author's grandsons. His diary and letters covering 
the period of his life in London have been published 
in two volumes by a great-grandson, since 1884, and 
amply confirm the most favourable view that can be 
taken of his character and motives. These documents 
give a most entertaining view of the state of opinion 
in London, as the fragmentary tidings of the war found 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 49 

their way across the ocean, and they throw much Hght 
upon the history of the whole situation. The writer's 
intense love for New England is mournfully conspicu- 
ous from first to last. Until Burgoyne's surrender he 
cherished the hope of returning thither, but after that 
event he resigned himself to the probability that he 
must die in exile. The deaths of two of his five chil- 
dren took from his fast-diminishing strength. On the 
3d of June, 1780, as he was getting into his carriage 
at Brompton, there came a stroke of apoplexy, and he 
fell back into the arms of his servant. His funeral 
procession passed by the smouldering wrecks of houses 
just burned in those hideous Gordon riots that Dickens 
has immortalized in " Barnaby Rudge." 

For intellectual gifts and accomplishments, Hutch- 
inson stands far above all the other colonial governors 
and in the foremost rank among American public men 
of whatever age. For thorough grasp of finance, he 
was the peer of Hamilton and Gallatin. In 1809 John 
Adams, who loved him not, said " he understood the 
subject of coin and commerce better than any man I 
ever knew in this country." His mastery of law was 
equally remarkable, and as a historian his accuracy is 
of the highest order. His personal magnetism was so 
great that in spite of all vicissitudes of popular feeling, 
so long as he remained upon the scene, and until after 
his departure for England had been followed by the 
outbreak of war, he did not fully lose his hold upon the 
people. He was nothing if not public-spirited, and his 
kindness toward persons in distress and sorrow knew 
no bounds. Yet in intellectual sympathy with plain 
common people he seems to have been deficient. He 
was too thoroughly an aristocrat to enter into their 



50 THOMAS HUTCHINSON 

ways of thinking; and herein was one source of his 
weakness as a statesman. But the chief source of that 
weakness, as is so often the case, was closely related to 
one of his most remarkable features of strength. That 
inborn legal quality of his mind which, without the 
customary technical training, made him a jurist capa- 
ble of winning the admiration of Lord Mansfield, was 
too strongly developed. Allied with his rigid Puritan 
conscience, it outweighed other good qualities and 
warped his nature. He was enveloped in a crust of 
intense legality, through which he could not break. 
If he had lived a century later, he might have written 
the memorable pamphlet in which another great Mas- 
sachusetts jurist, Benjamin Curtis, argued that Presi- 
dent Lincoln had no constitutional authority for 
emancipating the slaves. It is always well that such 
strides in advance should be made under careful pro- 
test, for only thus is society kept secure against crude 
experiments. But the men best fitted to utter the pro- 
test are not likely to be competent leaders in revolu- 
tionary times, when it becomes necessary to view many 
facts in a new light. For this is required the rare tact 
of a Samuel Adams or a Lincoln. It was Hutchin- 
son's misfortune that, with such a rigidly legal tem- 
perament, he should have been called to fill a supreme 
executive ofifice at the moment of a great revolutionary 
crisis. Nothing but failure and obloquy could come 
from such a situation. Yet the pages of history are 
strewn with examples of brave men slain in defence of 
unworthy causes, and because they have been true to 
their convictions we honour and respect them. Never 
did Hutchinson flinch a hair's-breadth for the sake of 
personal advancement. Would that there were more 



LAST ROYAL GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS 5 1 

of this disinterested courage among our public men 
to-day ! When we Usten to the cowardly talk of can- 
didates who use language to conceal thought, and 
dare not speak out like men for fear of losing votes, 
it occurs to us sometimes that in the life of nations 
there is no danger so great as the loss of true manli- 
ness; and we cannot but feel that from the stormy 
career of this old Tory governor — maligned, misun- 
derstood, and exiled, but never once robbed of self- 
respect — there is still a lesson to be learned. 



II 

CHARLES LEE 

THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 



II 

CHARLES LEE 

* THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 

Whenever a great war is going on, it is apt to draw 
from other countries a crowd of officers who come to 
look on and give advice, or perhaps to study the art of 
war under new conditions, or to carve out for them- 
selves a career for which no chance seems to be 
offered them at home. This was amply illustrated in 
the American War of Independence. The war was 
watched with interest in Europe, not from any special 
regard for the Americans, — about whom people in 
general knew rather less than they knew about the 
inhabitants of Dahomey or of Kamtchatka, — but from 
a belief that the result would seriously affect the posi- 
tion of Great Britain as a European power. A swarm 
of officers crossed the Atlantic in the hope of obtaining 
commands, and not less than twenty-seven such for- 
eigners served in the Continental army, with the rank 
of general, either major or brigadier. I do not refer 
to such French allies as came with Rochambeau, or in 
company with the fleets of D'Estaing and De Grasse. 
I refer only to such men as obtained commissions 
from Congress and were classed for the time as Ameri- 
can officers. For the most part these men came In 
the earlier stages of the war, before the French alliance 
had borne fruit. Some were drawn hither by a noble, 
disinterested enthusiasm for the cause of political lib- 

55 



56 CHARLES LEE 

erty; some were mere selfish schemers, or crack- 
brained vagrants in quest of adventure. Among the 
latter one of the most conspicuous was Thomas Con- 
way. Among the former there were five who attained 
real eminence, and have left a shining mark upon the 
pages of history. These were De Kalb and Pulaski, 
who gave up their lives on the battle-field ; Lafayette 
and Kosciuszko, who afterwards returned to their own 
countries to play honourable but unsuccessful parts ; 
and, last not least, the noble Steuben, who died an 
American citizen in the second term of Washington's 
presidency. 

But in the eyes of the generation which witnessed 
the beginning of the Revolutionary War, none of the 
European ofiicers just mentioned was anything like 
so conspicuous or so interesting a figure as the man to 
whose career I invite your attention this evening; 
Charles Lee was on the ground here before any of 
these others ; he had already been in America ; he 
came with the greatest possible amount of noise ; he 
laid claim to the character of a disinterested enthusiast 
so vehemently that people believed him. For a while 
he seemed completely identified with the American 
cause ; and as his name happens to be the same as 
that of an illustrious Virginian family, posterity seems 
to have been in some dano^er of forsrettino: that he was 
not himself an American. I don't know how many 
times I have been asked to state his relationship to the 
Lees of Virginia; and, what is worse, I found in print 
some time ago, in a histoiy of the town of Greenwich, 
R.I., the statement that the traitor of Monmouth was 
father of the great general, Robert Edward Lee, who 
might thus be supposed to have inherited what the 



THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 57 

writer is pleased to consider his natural propensity 
toward treason ! ^ Such absurdities show that even 
the industrious writers of town histories do not always 
consult biographical dictionaries and other easily 
accessible sources of information, but it is a pity that 
they should find their way into print. Whether the 
Cheshire family to which Charles Lee belonged was 
in any remote way connected with the Lees of Vir- 
ginia is uncertain. Of Charles Lee's immediate 
ancestry little is known except that he was the young- 
est son of John Lee, of Dernhall in Cheshire, and 
Isabella, daughter of Sir Henry Bunbury, of Stanney 
in the same county. John Lee was for some time 
captain of dragoons, and at length, after 1742, colonel 
of the 44th regiment of infantry. Charles Lee was 
born at Dernhall in 1731, and is said to have received 
a commission in the army at the age of eleven. This 
seems at first a ridiculous story ; but that was an age 
of abuses, and a study of the British army list in the 
good old days of the two first Georges brings to light 
some astonishing facts. Ensigns and cornets were 
duly enrolled, and drew their quarterly stipends, before 
leaving the nursery ; and the Duchess of Marlborough, 
in one of her letters, has something still better to tell. 
Colonel Lepel made his own daughter a cornet in his 
regiment as soon as she was born ; and why not ? asks 
the duchess; at that time of life a girl was quite as 
useful to the army as a boy. This girl was afterward 
Lady Hervey, and she went on drawing her salary as 

^ " Charles Lee died a miserable, neglected, and disappointed man. It 
would seem that treason is hereditary, as his son, the late General Lee, 
commander-in-chief of the Southern Rebellion (sic), followed in the foot- 
steps of his father." — D. H. Greene's "History of East Greenwich, R.I.," 
p. 259. 



58 CHARLES LEE 

cornet for some years after she had become maid of 
honour to the queen. By and by it occurred to Lord 
Sunderland that this was a Httle too absurd; and so 
he induced her to resign her commission in exchange 
for a pension from George I.^ This memorable inci- 
dent seems to have escaped the notice of our modern 
framers of pension bills. 

As the date at which Charles Lee reached the age 
of eleven was precisely that at which his father reached 
the rank of colonel, it is not improbable that he may 
have received a commission of the sort just described. 
However this may have been, he is known to have 
studied at the free grammar-school of Bury St. Ed- 
munds, in Suffolk, and afterward at an academy in 
Switzerland. He acquired some familiarity with 
Greek and Latin, and a thorough practical knowledge 
of French. In later years, in the course of his 
rambles about Europe, he became more or less pro- 
ficient in Spanish, Italian, and German. From an 
early age he seems to have applied himself diligently 
to the study of the military art. In May, 1751, shortly 
after his father's death, he received a lieutenant's com- 
mission in that 44th regiment, of which his father 
had been colonel. The regiment was ordered to 
America in 1754, and under its lieutenant-colonel, 
Thomas Gage, formed the advance of Braddock's 
army, and received the first attack of the French and 
Indians in the terrible battle of the Monongahela. It 
was in this disastrous campaign that Lee must have 
become acquainted with Horatio Gates and perhaps 
with George Washington. The remains of the shat- 
tered army were in the autumn taken northward to 

^ G. H. Moore, "Treason of Charles Lee," p. 5. 



THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 59 

Albany and Schenectady, where they went into win- 
ter quarters. Lee was present at several conferences 
between Sir William Johnson and the chiefs of the 
Six Nations, and became much interested in the 
Indians. His relations with them soon became so 
friendly that he was adopted into the Mohawk tribe of 
the Bear, and thus acquired the privilege of smoking 
a pipe with them as they sat around the council fire. 
He also formed a temporary matrimonial alliance with 
one of the foremost families of the Six Nations, and 
wrote about it to his sister in England, with quaint 
frankness. " My wife," said he, " is daughter to the 
famous White Thunder who is Belt of Wampum to 
the Senakas — which is in fact their Lord Treasurer. 
She is a very great beauty, and is more like your 
friend Mrs. Griffith than anybody I know. I shall 
say nothing of her accomplishments, for you must be 
certain that a woman of her fashion cannot be without 
many." The Indians, he continues, are even more 
polite than the French, " if you will allow good breed- 
ing to consist in a constant desire to do everything that 
will please you, and a strict carefulness not to say or 
do anything that may offend you." Of this well-bred 
desire to please, the same letter gives an instance.^ 
A young Mohawk, anxious to show his gratitude for 
some trifling service Lee had rendered him, prowled 
about the neighbouring woods until he succeeded in 
killing a French sergeant on picket duty; then he 
carefully decorated the scalp with bright blue ribbons 
and presented it to Lee in token of brotherly love. 
Lee's definition of good breeding is excellent ; but his 
practice did not comport with his theory. He was 

^ New York Historical Society Collections, Lee Papers, I. 5. 



6o CHARLES LEE 

already noted among his fellow-soldiers for an arro- 
gant and quarrelsome temper, and the significant 
name bestowed upon him by his Mohawk friends was 
" Boiling Water." He seemed to court opportunities 
for saying and doing offensive things. His tongue 
bit shrewdly ; it was a nipping and an eager tongue. 
He was fond of commenting upon the imbecility of his 
superior officers, and the conduct of the war afforded 
plenty of occasions for this display of humour. 
About this time — in accordance with a practice 
which survived in the British army until Mr. Glad- 
stone put an end to it — he purchased, for ;!^900, a 
captain's commission in the 44th. The commission 
was dated June 11, 1756. The regiment did little 
that year except take part in a futile attempt to raise 
the siege of Oswego, which surrendered to the French 
on the 14th of August. After another idle winter in 
the neighbourhood of Albany, the troops were con- 
veyed by sea to Halifax, from which point the Earl of 
Loudon intended to pounce upon the great stronghold 
of Louisburg. A powerful force was collected, and 
some acres were prudently planted with succulent 
vegetables as a safeguard against scurvy ; but nothing 
more was accomplished, for the commander-in-chief, 
according to Franklin, resembled King George on the 
tavern sign-boards, always on horseback but never 
getting ahead. When Captain Lee openly derided 
the campaign as a " cabbage-planting enterprise," the 
remark drew public attention to the young man, and 
no doubt there were quarters where it sank deep and 
was remembered against him. 

Early in the next summer, 1758, we find the 44th 
regiment marching up the valley of the Hudson, as 



THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 6 1 

part of the fine army with which General Abercrombie 
was expected to take Ticonderoga. At the Flats near 
Albany, Lee's company encamped on the farm of Mrs. 
Schuyler, aunt of the distinguished general of that 
name, a noble and benevolent woman, of whom Mrs. 
Grant of Laggan has left such a charming description, 
in her " Memoirs of an American Lady." Mrs. Schuy- 
ler's generosity toward soldiers was well known ; but 
Lee, who had forgotten to provide himself with the 
proper certificates for obtaining supplies, and was 
seizing horses and oxen, blankets and eatables, to 
right and left, with as little ceremony as if in an 
enemy's country, did not spare this lady's well-stocked 
farm ; and when she ventured a few mild words of 
expostulation, he replied with such a torrent of foul 
epithet that she had much ado to restrain her ser- 
vants from assaulting him. A few days later came 
the murderous battle before Ticonderoga, where Brit- 
ish and Americans were so terribly defeated by Mont- 
calm. There Thomas Gage fought side by side with 
Israel Putnam and John Stark, little dreaming of 
another bright summer day near Boston, seventeen 
years to come ; there was slain Lord Howe, eldest of 
the three famous brothers ; and there in a gallant 
charge our cynical young captain was shot through 
the body and carried off from the field. Bruised and 
battered, and with two ribs broken, he doubtless had 
breath enough left to growl and snarl over the incom- 
petency of the general whom, in the next letter to his 
sister, he calls " beastly poltroon " and " booby-in- 
chief." On hearing the news, Mrs. Schuyler had her 
largest barn prepared for a hospital. Thither, with 
many others, Captain Lee was taken and treated so 



62 CHARLES LEE 

kindly that his rough heart was softened. He averred, 
with terrific oaths, that 'a place would surely be re- 
served for Madame in heaven, though no other woman 
should be there, and that he should wish for nothing 
better than to share her final destiny." ^ 

By December the wound had healed, and we find 
him in winter quarters on Long Island, thrashing the 
surgeon of his regiment for a scandalous lampoon. 
And here we are introduced to the first of a series of 
little " special providences " keeping this personage 
alive for the singular part which he was to play in 
American history. The cowardly doctor nursed his 
wrath, lurked among the bushes by a lonely roadside, 
seized the captain's bridle, and fired at his heart ; but 
the horse opportunely shied and the bullet tore Lee's 
clothing and skin just under the left arm. The sur- 
geon was cocking a second pistol when another 
officer came up and struck it from his hand. Then 
the surgeon was collared and dragged off to camp, 
where a court-martial presently turned him adrift 
upon the world. 

The next summer Lee was present at the capture 
of Fort Niagara, and was sent with a small party to 
follow the route of the few French who escaped. 
This was the first party of English troops that ever 
crossed Lake Erie. Their march led them to Fort 
Duquesne (now Pittsburg), which General Forbes had 
captured the year before. Thence a march of seven 
hundred miles brought them to Crown Point to meet 
General Amherst. There was yet another long march 
to Oswego and back before Lee settled down for the 
winter in Philadelphia, and was employed in beating 

1 Lossing's "Schuyler," I. 154. 



THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 63 

up recruits. In the final campaign of 1760 his regi- 
ment was part of the force led by Amherst from Lake 
Ontario down the St. Lawrence to Montreal; and 
after the capture of that town had completed the con- 
quest of Canada, he returned to England. His uncle, 
Sir William Bunbury, writing from London, had 
alluded to chances of promotion, and incidentally 
observed that many fashionable matches were re- 
ported, and he had better come home before all the 
fine young ladies were disposed of. Perhaps Sir 
William had not heard of the accomplished daughter 
of the " Lord Treasurer " White Thunder. The pro- 
motion came in August, 1761, when Lee was appointed 
Major in the 103d regiment, known as the Volunteer 
Hunters. War was then breaking out between Spain 
and Portugal, and in 1762 a small British army was 
sent to aid the Portuguese. The chief command of 
the allied forces was given to one of the ablest gen- 
erals of his time, the famous Count von Lippe-Schaum- 
burg, a grandson of King George L, and own cousin 
to the bi others Howe. Lee accompanied the expedi- 
tion with a brevet of lieutenant-colonel from the king 
of Portugal, and his brigadier-commander was General 
Burgoyne. The campaign was a brilliant success, and 
Lee received honourable mention for the masterly way 
in which he surprised and carried by storm the Span- 
ish position at Villa Velha on the Tagus. On his 
return to England he busied himself with schemes of 
colonization in America, in which he aspired to emu- 
late the fame of Penn and Oglethorpe. A colony was 
to be founded on the Ohio River below the Wabash, 
and another on the Illinois. Inducements were to be 
held out for Protestant emigrants from Switzerland 



64 CHARLES LEE 

and Germany, as well as from England ; but the 
enterprise found few supporters. About this time, in 
1763, the 103d regiment was disbanded, and Lee 
passed virtually into retirement as a major on half-pay. 
At this he was disappointed and enraged, for a good 
word from the Count von Lippe-Schaumburg had 
given him some reason to expect promotion. But the 
ministry disliked him, partly on account of his liberal 
opinions and the vehemence with which he declared 
them, partly because of the fierceness with which he vili- 
fied and lampooned anybody of whom he disapproved. 
Though his later career showed that he had not the 
courage of his convictions, yet there can be no doubt 
that he really entertained very decided opinions. He 
was a radical free-thinker of the unripe, acrid sort, like 
his contemporaries, John Wilkes and Thomas Paine. 
He wrote and talked quite sensibly about many 
things; his sympathetic appreciation of Beccaria's 
great treatise on " Crime and Punishment " was much 
to his credit ; as a schoolboy in Switzerland he had 
learned republican theories under good teachers ; and 
there is no reason for doubting his sincerity in hating 
and despising the despotism which then prevailed 
almost everywhere on the continent of Europe. 
Sometimes he dealt humorously with such topics ; as 
in his epistle to David Hume. In reading books on 
history, he said, nothing had so frequently shocked 
him as the disrespectful and irreverent manner in 
which divers writers have spoken of crowned heads. 
" Many princes, it must be owned, have acted in some 
instances not altogether as we could wish," but it is 
the duty of the historian to draw a veil over their 
weakness. He was glad to see that Mr. Hume had 



THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 65 

acted upon this sound precept in depicting the exalted 
virtues of the Stuarts. He had heard that this history 
of England was the only one his sacred Majesty 
George III. could be induced to read, and he didn't 
wonder at it. He had often thought of writing his- 
tory himself, and now that he had got his cue from 
Mr. Hume, he should go on and devote his energies 
to the much-needed task of rescuing from unmerited 
odium those grossly slandered saints, the emperor 
Claudius and his successor Nero. 

But it was seldom that Lee's sarcasm was so gentle 
as this. Usually he lost his temper and hurled about 
such epithets as scoundrels, idiots, numskulls, diaboli- 
cal tyrants, damned conspirators, sceptred robbers, 
impious cutthroats. Was it a public man of whom 
he disapproved, he would say " everything he touches 
becomes putrid ; " was it some opinion from which 
he dissented, he would say " it was the most cun- 
ning fierd in hell who first broached this doctrine." ^ 
Speech less peppery than this seemed tasteless to 
Charles Lee. The accumulation of oaths and super- 
latives often makes the reading of his letters and 
pamphlets rather dreary work. When they were first 
published, or quoted in conversation, they served to 
offend powerful people and ruin the writer's hopes of 
advancement. Had he been a man of real ability, or 
had he been favoured by some queer freak of fortune 
that would have made him, like Wilkes, a bone of 
contention, he might have risen to eminence in the 
opposition party. But his talents were too slender for 
this; something more than growling and swearing 
was needed. Accordingly he soon made up his mind 

^ New York Historical Society Collections, Lee Papers, 1. 74. 



66 CHARLES LEE 

that he was not properly appreciated in England, and 
early in 1 765 he made his way to that home of turbu- 
lent spirits, Poland, where he received an appointment 
on the staff of the new king, Stanislaus Augustus. 
Next year, in accompanying the Polish embassy to 
Turkey, he narrowly escaped freezing to death on the 
Balkan Mountains, and again, while in Constantinople, 
came near being buried in the ruins of his house, 
which was destroyed by an earthquake. In 1766 he 
returned to England and spent two years in a fruitless 
attempt to obtain promotion. Having at length quite 
established his reputation as a disappointed and vin- 
dictive place-hunter, he tried Poland again. In 1769 
he was commissioned major-general in the Polish 
army, but did not relinquish his half-pay as a British 
major, because it was "too considerable a sum to 
throw away wantonly."^ Early in the winter he 
served in a campaign against the Turks, and was 
present in a battle at Chotzim on the Moldavian 
frontier. Here, as usual, he declared that the com- 
manders under whom he served were fools.^ His 
brief service was ended by a fever from which he 
barely escaped with his life. The rest of the winter 
was spent in Vienna, and in the spring of 1770 he pro- 
ceeded to Italy, where he lost two fingers in an affair 
of honour in which an Italian officer crossed swords 
with him. His earliest biographer, Edward Lang- 
worthy, observes that "his warmth of temper drew 
him into many rencounters of this kind ; in all which 
he acquitted himself with singular courage, sprightli- 
ness of imagination, and great presence of mind."^ 

1 Moore, p. 15. ^Lee Papers, I. 89. 

» Langworthy, " Memoirs of Charles Lee," London, 1792, p. 8. 



THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 6/ 

What in the world sprightliness of imagination in 
duelling may be, we are left to conjecture. Perhaps 
in this case it may have been exemplified in the imme- 
diate recourse to pistols, the result of which was that 
the Italian was slain, and Lee was obliged to flee to 
Gibraltar, where he embarked for London. In May, 
1772, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant- 
colonel on half-pay, but was unable to obtain any 
further recognition from government. 

Ever since the Stamp Act our knight-errant had 
kept an eye upon the troubles in America, and his 
letters show that by soldiers and princes at least, even 
as far as Poland, the quarrel between Great Britain 
and her colonies was watched with interest. It now 
seems to have occurred to him that America might 
afford a promising career for a soldier of fortune. He 
arrived in New York on the loth of November, 1773, 
in the midst of the agitation over the tea ships, and 
the next ten months were spent in a journey through 
the colonies as far as Virginia in one direction and 
Massachusetts in the other. In the course of this 
journey he made the acquaintance of nearly all the 
leaders of the Revolutionary party, and won high favour 
from the zeal with which he espoused their cause. He 
visited Mount Vernon and was warmly greeted by 
Washington. Whether Washington remembered him 
or not, as a lieutenant in 1755, is not at all clear. But 
now the great European soldier, who had fought on 
the banks of the Tagus and of the Dniester, and was 
a member of the liberal party in England withal, was 
sure to interest the noble, genial, and modest man who 
commanded the militia of Virginia. Whether he 
could have found favour with Mrs. Washington is 



68 CHARLES LEE 

much more doubtful. With ladies Lee was never a 
favourite. Mercy Warren, the sister of James Otis, 
and one of the brightest and most highly cultivated 
women of her time, saw Lee under all the glamour of 
his newly assumed greatness, yet, while she admitted 
that he was "judicious" and "learned" (these were 
her words), she could not but remark upon his extreme 
coarseness and his slovenly habits. Indeed, when we 
observe the frightful latitude of speech in some of his 
letters, we feel that he would have been an uncom- 
fortable guest to invite to dinner. He was tall and 
extremely slender, almost without shoulders, the fore- 
head rather high but very narrow, the nose aquiline 
and enormous, the complexion sallow, the eyes small 
and deep-set, inquisitive and restless, the upper lip 
curled in chronic disdain of everything and every- 
body, the chin contracted and feeble ; such was Charles 
Lee at the age of two and forty, when he revisited 
America, a weak, dyspeptic, querulous man. His linen, 
like Daniel Quilp's, was of a peculiar hue, for such was 
his taste and fancy; his clothes had the air of hav- 
ing been only half put on ; and he was seldom seen in 
private or in public without five or six dogs at his 
heels. Once he is said to have invited a friend to 
dinner, and when the meal was served the only other 
guests were found to be half a score of dogs, both 
great and small, which squatted on chairs and lapped 
up their food from plates set before them on the 
table. " I must have some object to embrace," said 
he ; " when I can be convinced that men are as worthy 
objects as dogs, I shall transfer my benevolence, and 
become as stanch a philanthropist as the canting 
Addison affected to be." 



THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 69 

All these uncouth looks and ways were at first inter- 
preted by the people as eccentricities of genius. To 
some persons, doubtless, they seemed to add a touch 
of romantic interest to a man whom every one looked 
upon as a public benefactor. There is no doubt that 
at this time he did render some real services with 
tongue and pen, while his self-seeking motives were 
hidden by the earnestness of his arguments in behalf 
of political liberty and the unquestionable sincerity of 
his invectives against the British government. The 
best of his writings at this time was the " Strictures on 
a Friendly Address to all Reasonable Americans, in 
Reply to Dr. Myles Cooper," in which the arguments 
of the Tory president of King's College were severely 
handled. This pamphlet, published in 1774, was many 
times reprinted, and exerted considerable influence. 
While the first Continental Congress was in session at 
Philadelphia, Lee was present in that city and was 
ready with his advice and opinions. He set himself 
up for an expert in military matters, and there was not 
a campaign in ancient or modern history which he 
could not expound and criticise with the air of a man 
who had exhausted the subject. The American leaders, 
ill acquainted with military science, and flattered by 
the prospect of securing the aid of a great European 
soldier, were naturally ready to take him at his own 
valuation ; but he felt that one grave obstacle stood in 
the way of his appointment to the chief command. In 
a letter to Edmund Burke, dated the i6th of December, 
1774, he observed that he did not think the Americans 
"would or ought to confide in a man, let his qualifi- 
cations be ever so great, who has no property among 
them." To remove this objection he purchased, for 



70 CHARLES LEE 

about ;^5000 in Virginia currency (equal to about 
;^3000 sterling), an estate in Berkeley County, in the 
Shenandoah valley, near that of his friend Horatio 
Gates. He did not complete this purchase till the 
last of May, 1775, while the second Continental Con- 
gress was in session. A letter to Gates at this time 
seems to indicate that he was awaiting the action of 
the Congress, and did not finally commit himself to 
the purchase until virtually sure of a high military 
command. To pay for the estate he borrowed ^3000 
of Robert Morris, to whom he mortgaged the property 
as security, while he drew bills on his attorney in 
England for the amount. On the 17th of June he 
received as high a command as Congress thought it 
prudent to give him, that of second major-general in 
the Continental army. The reasons for making Wash- 
ington commander-in-chief were generally convincing. 
It was as yet only the four New England states that 
had actually taken up arms, and in order to swell the 
rebellion to continental dimensions it was indispensa- 
ble that Virginia should commit herself irrevocably in 
the struggle. For this reason John Adams was fore- 
most in urging the appointment of Washington as 
commander-in-chief. But as the only Continental army 
at that moment existing was the force of sixteen thou- 
sand New England men with which General Artemas 
Ward was besieging Boston, it was not deemed polite 
to place a second in command over Ward. Some of 
Lee's friends, and in particular Thomas Mifflin, after- 
ward active in the Conway cabal, urged that he should 
at least have the first place after Washington; but John 
Adams declared that, while the New England army 
would cheerfully serve under Washington, it could not 



THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 7 1 

be expected to acquiesce in having another than its 
own general in the next place. Accordingly Ward was 
appointed first of the major-generals and Lee second. 
The British adventurer, who had cherished hopes of 
receiving the chief command, was keenly disappointed. 
For the present he repressed his spleen against Wash- 
ington, but made no secret of his contempt for Ward, 
whom he described as " a fat old gentleman who had 
been a popular churchwarden, but had no acquaintance 
whatever with military affairs." When Lee was in- 
formed of his appointment, he begged leave, before 
accepting it, to confer with a committee of Congress 
with regard to his private affairs. The committee be- 
ing immediately appointed, he made it a condition of 
his entering the American service that he should be 
indemnified by Congress for any pecuniary loss he 
might suffer by so doing, and that this reimbursement 
should be made as soon as the amount of such loss 
should be ascertained. Congress at once assented to 
this condition, and Lee accepted his appointment. Up 
to this moment he had retained his commission as 
lieutenant-colonel in the British army. Three days 
after obtaining definite promise from Congress, he 
wrote to Lord Barrington, the secretary of war, in the 
following characteristic vein : — 

" My Lord : Although I can by no means subscribe 
to the opinion of divers people in the world, that an 
officer on half-pay is to be considered in the service, 
yet I think it a point of delicacy to pay a deference to 
this opinion, erroneous and absurd as it is. I there- 
fore apprise your lordship, in the most public and 
solemn manner, that I do renounce my half-pay from 
the date hereof. At the same time I beg leave to 



72 CHARLES LEE 

assure your lordship that whenever it may please his 
Majesty to call me forth to any honourable service 
against the natural hereditary enemies of our country, 
or in defence of his just rights and dignity, no man 
will obey the righteous summons with more zeal and 
alacrity than myself ; but the present measures seem 
to me so absolutely subversive of the rights and lib- 
erties of every individual subject, so destructive to the 
whole empire at large, and ultimately so ruinous to his 
Majesty's own person, dignity, and family, that I think 
myself obliged in conscience, as a citizen, Englishman, 
and soldier of a free state, to exert my utmost to defeat 
them. I most devoutly pray to Almighty God to direct 
his Majestyinto measures more consonant to his interest 
and honour, and more conducive to the happiness and 
glory of his people." ^ 

That Lee should have felt called upon to refuse 
further pay from the crown at the moment of accept- 
ing a commission from a revolutionary body engaged 
in maintaininof armed resistance to the crown and its 
officers, one would think but natural. That in so 
doing he should have declared himself to be acting in 
deference to an absurd and overstrained notion of deli- 
cacy, shows how far from overstrained his own sense 
of deHcacy was. His letter^ is an unconscious con- 
fession that he ought long ago to have resigned his 
half-pay. Now he was simply making a merit of 
necessity ; for there could be little doubt that, as soon 
as the news of his American commission should reach 
the ears of the ministry, his half-pay would be cut off, 

1 Lee Papers, L i86. 

2 Found in February, 1858, in Sutton Court, Somerset, home of Sir 
Edward Strachey, where he kept many documents. 



THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 73 

and his other sources of income, amounting in all to 
about ^looo yearly, confiscated. It was right that he 
should be indemnified for the loss, and Congress did 
not for a moment call in question the reasonableness 
of his request. Nevertheless, when we remember how 
Lee was afterward fond of prating about his rare dis- 
interestedness and the sacrifices he had made in the 
cause of American freedom, when we consider espe- 
cially how he liked to bring himself into comparison 
with Washington, to the disadvantage of the latter, we 
cannot help feeling the strong contrast between all 
this careful bargaining and the conduct of the high- 
minded man who, at that same moment, in accepting 
the chief command of the Revolutionary army, refused 
to take a penny for his services. 

To this matter of Lee's indemnification our atten- 
tion will again be directed. Meanwhile, having thus 
entered the American service, the soldier of fortune 
accompanied Washington in his journey to Cam- 
bridge, and at every town through which they passed 
he seemed to be quite as much an object of curiosity 
and admiration as the commander-in-chief. Accord- 
ing to Lee's own theory of the relationship between 
the two, his was the controlling mind. He was the 
trained and scientific European soldier to whose care 
had been in a measure intrusted this raw American 
general, who for political reasons had been placed in 
command over him. In point of fact, Lee's military 
experience, as we have here passed it in review, had 
been scarcely more extensive than Washington's ; and 
of actual responsibility he had wielded much less. 
Such little reputation as he had in Europe was not 
that of a soldier, but of a caustic pamphleteer. Yet if 



74 CHARLES LEE 

he had been the hero of a dozen great battles, if he 
had rescued Portugal from the Spaniard and Poland 
from the Turk, he could not have claimed or obtained 
more deference in this country than he did. And no 
one treated him with higher consideration, or showed 
more respect for his opinions, than the grand and 
modest hero, all unconscious of his own Titanic 
powers^ who rode beside him. 

On arriving at Cambridge, Lee was placed in com- 
mand of the left wing of the army, with his head- 
quarters at Winter Hill, in what is now Somerville. 
The only incident that marked his stay at Cambridge 
was a correspondence with his old friend Burgoyne, 
then lately arrived in Boston, which led to a scheme 
for a conference between Lee and Burgoyne, with a 
view to the restoration of an amicable understanding 
between the colonies and the mother country. The 
proposal came from Burgoyne, and Lee treated it 
with frankness and discretion. He laid the matter 
before the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, and 
when that body mildly signified its disapproval but 
left it for Lee to decide, he sent a polite note to Bur- 
goyne declining the interview. This was in July. 
Four months afterward there came from the Old 
World a warning that Lee was not a man of trust- 
worthy character. A provisional government had then 
been formed in Massachusetts with the president of the 
council for its executive head, and James Otis, in one 
of the last of his lucid intervals, then occupied that 
position. On the 14th of November Otis sent a letter 
to Lee, quite touching for its high-minded simplicity. 
The council had come into possession of a letter from 
Ireland, making very unfavourable mention of Lee. 



THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 75 

It produced no impression upon the council. On 
the contrary, says Otis, " we are at a loss to know 
which is the highest evidence of your virtues — the 
greatness and number of your friends, or the malice 
and envy of your foes." ^ Good advice is often taken 
in this way. A century has passed without giving us 
any further clew to this letter. 

In December it was learned that Sir Henry Clinton 
was about to start from Boston on an expedition to the 
southward, and fears were entertained for Rhode 
Island and New York. Washington accordingly sent 
Lee to meet the emergency. After stopping at 
Newport long enough to arrest a few Tory citizens, 
Lee proceeded in January to New York, where he did 
good service in beginning the fortifications needed for 
the city and neighbouring strategic points. On the 
news of Montgomery's death, he was appointed to 
command the army in Canada; but scarcely had he 
been informed of this appointment when his destina- 
tion was changed. On the 19th of February, John 
Adams wrote him, "We want you at New York, we 
want you at Cambridge, we want you in Virginia, but 
Canada seems of more importance than any of these 
places, and therefore you are sent there. I wish you 
as many laurels as Wolfe and Montgomery reaped 
there, with a happier fate." From such expressions 
one may infer that, while Adams had for political 
reasons urged the appointment of Washington to the 
chief command of the army, he still placed his main 
reliance upon the presumed military talents of Lee. 
At any rate there can be little doubt that the adventurer 
himself so interpreted them. On the same day a letter 

1 Lee Papers, I. 218. 



76 CHARLES LEE 

from Franklin said, " I rejoice that you are going to 
Canada " ; and another from Benjamin Rush observed, 
" I tremble only at the price of victory . . . ; should 
your blood mingle with the blood of Wolfe, Montcalm, 
and Montgomery, posterity will execrate the Plains of 
Abraham to the end of time." But on the 3d of 
March Lee wrote to Washington : " My destination is 
altered. Instead of going to Canada, I am appointed 
to command to the southward. . . . As I am the only 
general officer on the continent who can speak and 
think in French, I confess it would have been more 
prudent to have sent me to Canada, but I shall obey 
with alacrity." The reason for this change was the 
discovery that Clinton's expedition was aimed at some 
point in the Southern states. Its effect upon Lee's 
fortunes was much more favourable than he supposed. 
In Canada, even if he had possessed all the genius for 
which people gave him credit, he could never have 
held his ground against Carleton's fine army, outnum- 
bering him four to one ; at the South, on the other 
hand, circumstances played into his hands and enabled 
him very cheaply to increase his reputation. He went 
first to Virginia, where he stayed till the middle of May, 
with headquarters at Williamsburg. The burning 
political question that spring was whether the colonies 
should unite in a declaration of independence, and on 
this point Lee expressed himself with his customary 
emphasis. To Edward Rutledge he wrote, " By the 
eternal God ! if you don't declare yourselves inde- 
pendent, you deserve to be slaves." At the hesitating 
action of the Maryland convention in March he lost 
all patience. " What ! " he cried, " when an execrable 

1 Lee Papers, I. 312-314; 343, 



THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE "J^ 

tyrant, an abandoned parliament, and a corrupt, pusil- 
lanimous people have formed a hellish league to rob 
you of everything men hold most dear ; is it possible 
there should be creatures who march on two legs and 
call themselves human, who can be so destitute of 
sentiment, courage, and feeling, as sobbingly to protest 
they shall consider separation from these butchers 
and robbers as the last of misfortunes? Oh, I could 
brain you with your ladies' fans ! " ^ We shall do well 
to remember this fervid vehemence when we come to 
the very different key in which the writer's sentiments 
are pitched just twelve months later. 

While these things were going on, Clinton was 
cruising about Albemarle Sound, but late in May Sir 
Peter Parker's fleet arrived, with fresh troops under 
Lord Cornwallis, and presently on the 4th of June the 
whole armada was collected before the entrance to 
Charleston harbour. Lee, following by land, reached 
the city on the same day. Preparations had already 
been made to resist the enemy, and Colonel William 
Moultrie was constructing his famous palmetto fort on 
Sullivan's Island. Lee blustered and found fault, as 
usual, sneered at the palmetto stronghold, and would 
have ordered Moultrie to abandon it ; but President 
Rutledge persuaded him to let the sagacious colonel 
have his way. In the battle which ensued, on the 
28th of June, between the fort and the fleet, Moultrie 
won a decisive and very brilliant victory. But as 
Moultrie was as yet unknown outside of South 
Carolina, the credit was by most people inconsiderately 
given to Lee. In his despatch to Congress the latter 
spoke generously of the courage and skill of his 

1 Langworthy's *' Memoirs," p. 382. 



78 CHARLES 'LEE 

subordinate officer. Perhaps it was hardly to be ex- 
pected of him that he should frankly confess that the 
victory was won through neglect of his own scientific 
advice. On the departure of the discomfited British 
fleet, the "hero of Charleston," as he was now called, 
prepared to invade Florida; but early in September 
he was ordered to report to Congress at Philadelphia. 
The question of his indemnification had been laid 
before Congress in a letter from Mr. Rutledge, dated 
the 4th of July, and action was now taken upon it. 
The bills for ;^ 3000 drawn upon his agent in England 
to repay the sum advanced by Robert Morris for the 
purchase of the Virginia estate had been protested for 
lack of funds, as Lee's property in England had been 
sequestrated. Congress accordingly voted, on the 7th 
of October, to advance $30,000 to General Lee by way 
of indemnification. Should his English estate ever 
be recovered, he was to repay this sum. 

This point having been made, he went on to New 
York, where he arrived on the 14th of October, and took 
command of the right wing of Washington's army 
upon Harlem Heights. By the resignation of General 
Ward in the spring, Lee had become senior major- 
general, and in the event of disaster to Washington 
he might hope at length to realize his wishes and be- 
come commander-in-chief. The calamitous fall of 
Fort Washington, on the i6th of November, seemed 
to afford the desired opportunity. At that moment 
Washington, whose defensive campaign had from the 
outset been marked in every particular by most con- 
summate skill, had placed half of his army on the New 
Jersey side of the river, in order to check any move- 
ment of the British toward Philadelphia. He had left 



THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 79 

Lee at Northcastle, with the other half of the army, 
about seven thousand men, with instructions to await 
his orders and move promptly upon receiving them. 
As soon as it had become evident that Howe was 
about to throw a superior force against Washington, 
the latter sent an order to Lee to cross the Hudson 
River without a moment s delay, and effect a junction 
of the two parts of the army. But Lee pretended to 
regard the order in the light of mere advice, raised 
objections, fumed and quibbled, and did not stir. 
While Washington was now obliged to fall back 
through New Jersey, in order to avoid fighting against 
overwhelming odds, his daily messages to Lee grew 
more and more peremptory, but no heed was paid to 
them. Many people were throwing the blame for the 
loss of Fort Washington upon the commander-in-chief, 
and were contrasting him unfavourably with the " hero 
of Charleston " ; and Lee, instead of obeying orders, 
busied himself in writing letters calculated to spread 
and increase this disaffection toward Washington. 
Among his correspondents were some of the men who 
in the course of the next year became implicated with 
the Conway cabal, such as Gates and Dr. Benjamin 
Rush. In letters to prominent New England men, he 
tried to play upon the most contemptible of all the 
mean feelings that disgrace human nature, — the feel- 
ing of sectional dislike and distrust which many in 
that part of the country entertained toward the great 
Virginian. At the same time he tried to assume com- 
mand over General Heath, whom Washington had left 
in charge of the Highlands with very explicit instruc- 
tions. Lee wished to detach part of Heath's force, 
and announced that since a broad river intervened 



8o CHARLES LEE 

between himself and Washington, he now considered 
himself invested with an independent command. But 
for courage and fidelity Heath was a true bulldog. 
Lee's letters to him grew more and more angry. " I 
suppose you think," said Lee, " that if General Wash- 
ington should remove to the Straits of Magellan, never- 
theless the instructions he left with you are to be 
followed in spite of what your superior officers might 
say ; but I will have you to understand that I command 
on this side of the river, and for the future I must and 
will be obeyed."^ Heath, however, was immovable; 
and a letter from Washington, arriving the next day, 
declared his own view of the case in such unequivocal 
language that Lee did not deem it prudent to push his 
Patagonian theory any farther. So he desisted, with 
a very ill grace, and on the 2d of December, after a 
fortnight's delay, he crossed the Hudson, with a force 
diminished to four thousand men. On that same day 
Washington in his swift retreat reached Princeton, 
with his force diminished to three thousand men. 
The terms of service of many of the soldiers had 
expired, and the prospect was so dismal, that few were 
willing to reenlist. It was the gloomiest moment in 
the Revolutionary War and in Washington's career; 
and the most alarming feature in the whole situation 
was this outrageous insubordination on the part of 
Lee. Washington had ordered him to keep well to 
the westward, and had even indicated the particular 
road and ferry by which he wished him to cross the 
Delaware, near Alexandria, but in flat disregard of 
these orders Lee marched slowly to Morristown. At 
this moment Gates was approaching, on his way from 

* Lee Papers, II. 313. 



THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 8 1 

Ticonderoga, with seven regiments sent down by 
Schuyler to Washington's assistance ; but Lee inter- 
posed, and with more success than he had had in 
Heath's case, diverted three of these regiments to 
Morristown. By this time Washington had retreated 
beyond the Delaware, and almost everybody considered 
his campaign hopelessly ruined. It seemed as if the 
cause of American independence was decisively over- 
thrown, and it certainly was not Charles Lee's fault 
that it was not so. His design in thus moving inde- 
pendently was to operate upon the British flank from 
Morristown, a position of which Washington himself 
afterward illustrated the great value. The selfish 
schemer wished to secure for himself whatever advan- 
tage might be gained from such a movement. His 
plan was to look on and see Washington defeated and 
humbled, and then strike a blow on his own account. 
If Cornwallis had prevailed upon Howe to let him col- 
lect a flotilla of boats and push on across the river in 
pursuit of Washington, there would have been a 
chance offered to Lee to strike the enemy's rear before 
the crossing had been fully effected. But Howe, per- 
haps mindful of such a contingency, decided to wait a 
few days in the hope of seeing the river frozen hard 
enough to bear troops. In the meantime Lee's castle 
in the air was overthrown by his own foolishness. On 
the 13th of December, having left his army in charge 
of Sullivan, he had for some unknown reason passed 
the night at White's tavern in Baskingridge, about 
four miles distant. A zealous Tory in the neighbour- 
hood had noted the fact, and galloped off to the 
nearest British encampment, eighteen miles distant. 
Lieutenant-colonel Harcourt, with Captain Banastre 



82 CHARLES LEE 

Tarleton and a party of thirty-eight horse, immediately 
started forth in quest of such high game. At day- 
break young Major Wilkinson arrived at the inn, with 
a message from Gates, and found Lee in bed. The 
general jumped up, thrust his feet into slippers, threw 
on an old flannel gown over his nightclothes, and pro- 
ceeded to write a letter to Gates, setting forth his own 
exalted merits and Washington's matchless stupidity. 
He had hardly signed and folded it when Wilkinson 
at the window screamed, " The British ! the British ! " 
In the twinkling of an eye the house was surrounded 
and the blustering letter-writer dragged from his bed- 
room. Several of these soldiers had served with Lee 
in Portugal and witnessed his gallantry at Villa Velha. 
They were now surprised and disgusted at seeing him 
fall on his knees in abject terror, raving like a mad- 
man and begging Colonel Harcourt to spare his life. 
" Had he behaved with proper spirit," says Captain 
Harris, in his journal, " I should have pitied him." 
No time was wasted. They picked him up, bare- 
headed and half-dressed, mounted him on Wilkinson's 
horse, tied him hand and foot, and led him off, with 
taunts and mirthful jeers. Of course, they said, he 
must not be surprised if General Howe were to treat 
him as a deserter, because he was one. The miserable 
creature muttered and cursed, and let fall one remark 
which they did not quite comprehend. " Just as I had 
got the supreme command," said he,^ and presently 
added, " The game is up, it is all up." So they carried 
him off to New Brunswick, while his troops, thus 
opportunely relieved of such a commander, were 
promptly marched by Sullivan to Washington's assist- 

^ Moore, p. 63. 



THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 83 

ance, in time to take part in the glorious movement 
upon Trenton and Princeton. Had it not been for 
Lee's capture, in the very nick of time, it is doubtful 
if Washington would have had men enough to under- 
take that movement, which instantly reversed the 
fortunes of the campaign and opened the way for the 
decisive triumphs of the next year. But the Ameri- 
cans, who did not possess the clew to Lee's strange 
conduct, felt that they had lost a treasure. 

Of his conduct in captivity, which would soon have 
afforded such a clew, nothing was known until all the 
actors in those stirring scenes had been for many a 
year in their graves. Lee was taken to New York 
and confined in the City Hall, where he was courte- 
ously treated, but he well understood that his life was 
in danger in case the British government should see 
fit to regard him as a deserter from the army. Sir 
William Howe wrote home for instructions, and in 
reply was directed to send his prisoner to England for 
trial. Lee had already been sent on board ship, when 
a letter from Washington put a stop to these proceed- 
ings. The letter informed Howe that Washington 
held five Hessian field-officers as hostages for Lee's 
personal safety. In thus choosing Hessians as hos- 
tages, Washington showed his unfailing sagacity. The 
king's feeling toward Lee was extremely bitter and 
revengeful, and no doubt he would have taken pleasure 
in putting him to an ignominious death ; but to disre- 
gard the safety of the Hessian officers would arouse a 
dangerous spirit of disaffection among the German 
troops. In this quandary the obstinate and vindictive 
king entered upon a discussion that lasted just a year. 
Letters went back and forth between Howe and the 



84 CHARLES LEE 

ministry on the one hand, and Howe and Washington 
on the other, until at length, in December, 1777, 
Howe was instructed to consider Lee a prisoner of 
war, and subject to exchange as such whenever con- 
venient. 

During this interval, while his fate was in suspense, 
the prisoner was busy in operations on his own ac- 
count. First he assured the brothers Howe that he 
was opposed to the Declaration of Independence ; that 
" if the Americans had followed his advice, matters 
could never have gone to such a length ; " ^ and even 
now he hoped, if he could only obtain an interview 
with a committee from Congress, to be able to open 
negotiations for an honourable and satisfactory adjust- 
ment of all existing difficulties. The Howes, who 
were well disposed toward the Americans and sin- 
cerely anxious for peace, allowed him to ask for the 
interview; but Congress refused to grant it. Lee's 
extraordinary conduct before his capture had some- 
what injured his reputation, and there were vague sus- 
picions, though no one knew exactly what to suspect 
him of. These doubts affected the soundness of his 
judgment rather than of his character. His behaviour 
was considered wayward and eccentric, but was not 
seen to be treacherous. The worst that was now sup- 
posed about him was that he had suffered himself to 
be hoodwinked by the Howes into requesting a con- 
ference that could answer no good purpose. If the 
truth had only been known, how sorely would all good 
people have been astonished ! No sooner was the 
conference refused than the wretch went over to the 
enemy, and sought to curry favour with the Howes by 

^ Moore, p. 83. 



THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 85 

giving them aid and counsel for the next campaign 
against the Americans. He went so far as to write 
out for them a detailed plan of operations. After the 
disastrous result of the campaign of 1777 the brothers 
did not wish to disclose the secret of their peculiar 
obligations to such an adviser. Lee's document re- 
mained in possession of their private secretary, Sir 
Henry Strachey, who carried it home to England next 
year, and carefully stowed it away with other papers 
in the library at Sutton Court, his fine, hospitable old 
country house in Somersetshire. There, after a slum- 
ber of eighty years, it was found and perused by intelli- 
gent eyes,^ and it has since found its way into the 
Lenox Library in New York. The paper is in Lee's 
handwriting, folded, and indorsed as " Mr. Lee's Plan 
— 29th March 1777." The indorsement is in the 
handwriting of Sir Henry Strachey. In this paper 
Lee expressly abandons the American cause, enters 
" sincerely and zealously " (those are his words) into 
the plans of the British commanders, and recommends 
an expedition to Chesapeake Bay essentially similar to 
that which was undertaken in the following summer. 
This elaborate paper throws some light upon the 
movements of General Howe, in July and August, 
1777, which were formerly regarded as so strange. 
Instead of moving straight up the Hudson River, to 
cooperate with Burgoyne in accordance with the care- 
fully studied plan of the ministry. General Howe 
wasted the summer in a series of movements which 
landed him at the end of August fifty miles south of 
Philadelphia, with Washington's army in front of him, 
while the gallant Burgoyne, three hundred miles away, 

"^ Magazine of American History, III. 450. 



86 CHARLES i.EE 

was marching to his doom. This supreme blunder 
on the part of Howe was ruinous to the British cause. 
It led directly to the surrender of Burgoyne, and thus 
to the French alliance and indirectly to Yorktown. 
The blunder was no doubt largely due to Lee's wild 
advice, but we owe him small thanks for it. It is im- 
possible to read his paper and not see that in his stu- 
pendous conceit he regarded himself as the palladium 
of the American cause. His capture he regarded as 
the final overthrow of that cause. What was left of it 
could be of no use to anybody, and he had better 
secure good terms for himself by helping to stamp it 
out as quickly as possible. 

If anything had been known about these treacherous 
shifts on the part of Lee, he certainly never would have 
been taken back into the American service. As noth- 
ing whatever was known about the matter, he was 
exchanged for General Richard Prescott early in May, 
1778, and joined Washington's army at Valley Forge. 
What a frightful situation for the Americans : to have, 
for the second officer in their army, the man whom the 
chances of war might at any moment invest with the 
chief command, such a man as this who had so lately 
been plotting their destruction! What would Wash- 
ington, what would Congress, have thought, had the 
truth in its blackness been so much as dreamed of ? 
But why, we may ask, did the intriguer come back ? 
Why did he think it worth his while to pose once more 
in the attitude of an American ? Could it have been 
with the intention of playing into the hands of the en- 
emy ? and could the British commander, knowing this 
purpose, have thus gladly acquiesced in his return .? It 
is hard to say, but probably this explanation is too 



THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 87 

simple to cover the case. We must remember that 
Sir WilHam Howe, the Whig general, had just re- 
signed his command and gone home to defend his 
military conduct against the fierce attacks of the king's 
party. His successor, Sir Henry Clinton, was not only 
a Tory, but the personal relations between the two 
were not altogether friendly ; so that it is hardly credi- 
ble that Clinton could have known anything about 
Lee's cooperation with Howe; if he had known it, 
the secret would not have been buried for eighty years. 
It is much more likely that, since the disastrous failure 
of Lee's advice, he was reduced to painful insignifi- 
cance in the British camp, and so thought it worth 
while to try his fortune again with the Americans. 
The past year had seen the tables completely turned. 
The American star was now in the ascendant; most 
people expected to see the British driven to their ships 
before autumn ; and Lord North's commissioners were 
on their way across the ocean, to offer terms of peace. 
While Lee could see all this, he could not see how 
greatly Washington's popular strength had increased 
during the past winter, as the intrigues against him 
had recoiled upon their authors. The days of the 
Conway cabal were really gone by, but this was not 
yet apparent to everybody. The ambitious schemes 
of Gates were frustrated, and Lee might now hope 
again to try his hand at supplanting Washington, with 
one more rival out of the way. Indeed, there is some 
reason for believing that the very schemers and syco- 
phants who had been putting Gates forward were al- 
ways ready, if occasion should offer, to drop him and 
take up Lee instead. Doubtless, therefore, Lee came 
back in the renewed hope of supplanting Washington. 



S8 CHARLES LEE 

Whether he can also have had any secret understand- 
ings with the enemy, it is hard to say. A very friendly 
letter from a British gentleman, George Johnson, dated 
at Philadelphia, the 17th of June, and addressed to 
General Lee at Valley Forge, observes in its post- 
script, " Sir Henry Clinton bids me thank you for 
your letter." ^ What this letter may have referred to, 
or whether it is still anywhere in existence, or whether 
there was any further correspondence between Clinton 
and Lee, we do not know. Sir Henry had, at any 
rate, probably seen and heard enough to confirm the 
declared opinion of Sir Joseph Yorke, that such a man 
as Charles Lee was " the worst present the Americans 
could receive." In the campaign just beginning he 
proved himself to be such. 

When, in June, Sir Henry Clinton evacuated Phila- 
delphia, it was his purpose to retreat across New 
Jersey to the city of New York without a battle, if 
possible. It was Washington's object to attack Clin- 
ton on his retreat, cut to pieces the rear division of his 
army, and thus essentially cripple him. Lee at first 
endeavoured to dissuade Washington from making 
such an attack. Then, when it was resolved to make 
the oblique attack upon the rear division, with the 
purpose of cutting it asunder from the advanced divi- 
sion, Lee showed such unwillingness to undertake the 
task that Washington assigned it to Lafayette. Each 
of the opposing armies numbered about fifteen thou- 
sand men, and since the arrival of Steuben, with his 
Prussian tactics and discipline, the quality of the 
American troops had been signally improved. Each 
army was marching in two divisions, three or four 

^Lee Papers, II. 406. 



THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 89 

miles apart. The American advance, of about six 
thousand men, under Lafayette, was to attack the 
British rear division upon its left flank and engage 
it until Washington, with the remainder of the army, 
should come up and complete its discomfiture. At 
the last moment Lee changed his mind and solicited 
the command of the advance. The nobleness of 
Washington's nature made him very kind in his judg- 
ments of other men. He was always ready to make 
allowances, and up to this time he had found some 
charitable interpretation for Lee's behaviour. Now 
he showed the defects of his excellence, and was too 
trustful. He so arranged matters that Lee should 
have the command, and Lafayette most gracefully 
yielded the point. Washington's orders to Lee were 
explicit and peremptory. On the morning of the 28th 
of June the advance division overtook the enemy near 
Monmouth Court House. The position was admirable 
for an oblique attack upon the British flank, and in 
the opinion of Anthony Wayne and other brigade 
commanders a prompt and spirited attack was called 
for. But the fighting had scarcely begun when Lee's, 
conduct became so strange and his orders so contra- 
dictory as to excite uneasiness on the part of Lafay- 
ette, who sent a messenger back to Washington, 
urging him to make all possible haste to the front. 
When the commander-in-chief, with his main force, 
had passed Freehold church on his way toward the 
scene of action, he was astonished at the spectacle of 
Lee's division in disorderly retreat, with the enemy 
close upon their heels. A little farther on he met the 
faithless general. The men who then beheld Wash- 
ington's face, and listened to his terrific outburst of 



90 CHARLES LEE 

wrath, could never forget it for the rest of their lives.^ 
It was one of those moments that Hve in tradition. 
People of to-day who know nothing else about Charles 
Lee think of him vaguely as the man whom Wash- 
ington upbraided at Monmouth. People who know 
nothing else about the battle of Monmouth still dimly 
associate it with the disgrace of a General Lee. Leav- 

^The following letter gives a version of the rebuke : — 

" Charlotteville, Va., Oct. 26, 1895. 
" Professor John Fiske : — 

" Dear Sir : — At your request, I have reduced to writing the incident 
I related to you last evening, at the reception, after your lecture upon Gen- 
eral Charles Lee — ' The Soldier of Fortune.' 

" I am, Sir, 

" Yours faithfully, 

"Wm. Robertson. 

"In the year 1840, while I was a student at Hampton, Sydney College, 
and boarding in the family of Mrs. Ann Rice (the widow of the Rev. John 
H. Rice, D.D.), her father. Major Jacob Morton, a Revolutionary soldier, 
living in an adjoining county (Cumberland), came to visit her. Major 
Morton was then upward of eighty years old, but still in full possession of 
all his mental faculties. . . . 

" The talk at the dinner table was of his reminiscences of the Revolu- 
tionary War . . . the Battle of Monmouth. ... I sought an opportun- 
ity of further conversation with him, and having heard or read that just 
before that battle General Washington, on meeting General Charles Lee in 
retreat, had ' cursed and swore ' at him, I asked Major Morton whether that 
report was true. * No, sir ! No, sir ! ' replied the major with animation. 
' It is not true ! It so happened that the meeting of General Washington 
with General Lee on that day took place within a very few yards of me, 
and I saw and heard all that passed between them. I will tell you how it 
was. Our troops were marching rapidly, expecting soon to be engaged 
with the British ; the day was very hot, the road heavy with sand, our men 
fatigued by the march. I was then a sergeant in my company and had fre- 
quently to face about in order to keep my platoon aligned on the march, — 
myself walking backwards. While doing so, I saw General Washington 
coming from the rear of our column, riding very rapidly along the right 
flank of the column ; and as he came nearer, my attention was fixed upon 
him with wonder and astonishment, for he was evidently under strong emo- 



THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 9 1 

ing the cowering and trembling culprit, Washington 
hurried on to rally the troops and give the orders 
which turned impending defeat into victory. As he 
rode about the field, his suspicions of foul play were 
more and more thoroughly aroused, and presently, 
meeting Lee again, he ordered him to the rear. The 

tion and excitement. I never saw such a countenance before. It was like 
a thunder-cloud before the flash of lightning. Just as he reached the flank 
of my platoon he reined up his horse a little, and raising his right hand 
high above his head, he cried out with a loud voice, " My God ! General 
Lee, what are you about ?" Until that moment I had not known that Gen- 
eral Lee was near; but on turning my head a little to the left (still stepping 
backward on the march) I found that General Lee had ridden from the 
head of our column along our right flank and was only a few yards distant, 
in front of General Washington. In answer to General Washington's ex- 
cited exclamation, "My God! General Lee, what are you about."* " General 
Lee began to make some explanation ; but General Washington impatiently 
interrupted him, and with his hand still raised high above his head, waving 
it angrily, exclaimed, " Go to the rear, sir," spurred his horse, and rode 
rapidly forward. The whole thing occurred as quickly as I can tell it to 
you.' 

" This conversation with old Major Morton interested me profoundly 
and made a deep impression upon my memory. My recollection of it is 
still (after the lapse of about fifty-five years) clear and distinct. What I 
have written about it, if not in his very words, is substantially what he told 
me. The words, 'My God ! General Lee, what are you about ? ' are the 
very words which he declared that General Washington uttered. I will 
add that Major Morton, in all the region of country in which he spent his 
long life, was reputed to be a man of the very highest integrity — no one 
who ever knew him ever doubted or questioned his veracity. Indeed, he 
was proverbial for honesty, courage, and veracity. Altho' only a sergeant 
at the date of the battle of Monmouth, he afterward rose to the rank of a 
major in the Revolutionary Army ; and in the service acquired the sobri- 
quet of 'Solid Column.' When, in 1825, General Lafayette revisited the 
United States, and held a levee at Richmond, Va., at which many of the 
surviving officers and soldiers of the Revolution from various parts of 
the state of Virginia attended, and were successively presented to him ; as 
Major Morton's turn came to be presented, Lafayette said, cordially, *Oh, 
it is not necessary to introduce " old Solid Column " to me, I remember 
him well.' 

"Wm. Robertson." 



92 CHARLES LEE 

next day Lee, having recovered his self-possession and 
thought of a Hne of defence, wrote to Washington 
demanding an apology for his language on the battle- 
field. Washington replied that he believed his words 
to have been fully warranted by the circumstances, and 
added that a court-martial would soon afford General 
Lee an opportunity for explaining his conduct. " Quite 
right," answered Lee; "you cannot afford me greater 
pleasure than in giving me the opportunity of showing 
to America the sufficiency of her respective servants. 
I trust that the temporary power of office, and the tin- 
sel dignity attending it, will not be able, by all the 
mists they can raise, to obfuscate the bright rays of 
truth." ^ Washington answered by placing Lee under 
arrest. He was tried by court-martial on three charges : 
(i) Disobedience of orders in not attacking the 
enemy. (2) Misbehaviour before the enemy in mak- 
ing an unnecessary, disorderly, and shameful retreat. 
(3) Gross disrespect to the commander-in-chief. On 
the 12th of August he was found guilty on all three 
charges, and suspended from all command in the army 
for the term of one year. 

For a long time Lee's conduct at Monmouth seemed 
quite unintelligible. The discoveries since made re- 
garding his behaviour in captivity do not yet clear it up, 
though they make it seem susceptible of the worst in- 
terpretation. If we suppose that he was actually in 
collusion with Clinton, the simplest supposition is that 
he intended to wreck the army ; and certainly few 
things could be better calculated to do so than throw- 
ing a mass of disorderly fugitives in the face of the 
advancing reenforcements. But I believe the true 

^Lee Papers, IL 437. 



THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 93 

explanation is not quite so simple as this. It does not 
seem probable that there was any secret understanding 
with Clinton. It is much more likely that Lee was 
again at his old trick of trying to discredit and supplant 
Washington. With this end in view he first loudly 
condemned Washington's plan of battle and refused 
to take the part assigned him. On second thought it 
occurred to him that by taking that command he 
might insure the defeat of Washington's plan, and 
still bring off the army to such a position that he 
might claim the credit for having saved it from the 
effects of Washington's rashness. This explanation 
is indicated by the line of defence which he chose upon 
his trial. His retreat lay across two deep ravines, and 
it was upon the brink of the second one that Wash- 
ington met him. He argued ingeniously before the 
court-martial that if he had attacked as Washington 
directed, the result would have been disastrous ; but 
in his retreat he was simply luring the enemy across 
these ravines into a position where he could suddenly 
turn upon him and defeat him with a dangerous ravine 
at his back. All this would have been done, he declared, 
if Washington had not come up and spoiled the game. 
This explanation may have been concocted after the 
event; but it is not unlikely that Lee may really have 
entertained some such wild scheme. A very difficult 
plan it would be to carry out, especially with his brigade 
commanders all hopelessly bewildered. Confusion 
could not but result, and well indeed it was that the 
reins of the runaway team were suddenly seized by the 
powerful hand of Washington. 

Such is the explanation least unfavourable to Lee. 
Even on his own showing it is one of the most out- 



94 CHARLES LEE 

rageous cases of insubordination recorded in the annals 
of war. But one incident, mentioned in the testimony 
of Steuben, throws perhaps the blackest shade upon 
the conduct of this miserable creature. After Lee had 
been ordered to the rear, as he rode away baffled and 
spiteful, he met Steuben with a couple of brigades 
hurrying to the front in pursuance of an order just 
received from Washington. Lee now tried to turn 
him off in another direction, alleging that the order 
was misunderstood. But the good baron was not to 
be trifled with and resolutely kept on his way.^ Lee 
was so enraged at this testimony that he made reflec- 
tions upon Steuben, which presently called forth a 
challenge from that gentleman.^ That " sprightliness 
of imagination " heretofore mentioned seems now to 
have deserted our soldier of fortune. It is to be re- 
gretted that we have not the reply in which he 
declined the encounter. There is a reference to it in 
a letter from Alexander Hamilton to the Baron von 
Steuben, a fortnight after the challenge : " I have 
read your letter to Lee with pleasure. It was conceived 
in terms which the offence merited, and if he had any 
feeling, must have been felt by him. Considering the 
pointedness and severity of your expressions, his 
answer was certainly a very modest one, and proved 
that he had not a violent appetite for so close a tete-a- 
tete as you seemed disposed to insist upon. His 
evasions, if known to the world, would do him very 
little honour."^ Upon what grounds Lee refused to 
fight with Steuben, it is hard to surmise ; for within 
another week we find him engaged in a duel with 

^ Lee Papers, in. 96. */<!/. 253. 

»/</. 254. 



THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 95 

Washington's aide-de-camp, Colonel Laurens, for 
whom Hamilton acted as second/ In this affair Lee 
was slightly wounded in the right arm. His venomous 
tongue now kept getting him into trouble more than 
ever. He could not hear Washington's name men- 
tioned without losing his temper. After some time 
he addressed one of his impudent letters to Congress, 
and was immediately dismissed from the army. He 
retired in disgrace to his estate in the Shenandoah 
valley, and lived there long enough to witness the final 
triumph of the cause he had done so much to injure. 
On a visit to Philadelphia he was suddenly seized with 
a fever, and died in a tavern, friendless and alone, on 
the 2d of October, 1782. His last words, uttered in 
delirium, were, " Stand by me, my brave grenadiers ! " 
A scoffer to the last, he had expressed in his will a 
wish that he might not be buried within a mile of any 
church or meeting-house, as since his arrival in Amer- 
ica he had kept so much bad company in this world 
that he did not wish to continue it in the next. He 
was buried, however, in the cemetery of Christ Church, 
and his funeral was attended by the President of Con- 
gress and other eminent citizens. 

General Lee was one of the numerous persons 
credited with the authorship of the famous " Letters 
of Junius," and the way in which this came to pass is 
worthy of notice for the further illustration it affords 
of his character. In a letter dated at Dover, Feb- 
ruary I, 1803, published in the Wilmington Mirror 
and copied into the St. James Chronicle, London, 
Mr. Thomas Rodney gave the substance of a conversa- 
tion between himself and General Lee in 1773. That 

1 Id. 283. 



96 CHARLES LEE 

was the year when Lee came to America and travelled 
up and down the country in order to impress upon 
the minds of our people his great importance in the 
European world. In the course of this conversation 
Lee observed that not a man in the world but himself, 
not even the publisher, knew the secret of the author- 
ship of "Junius." Rodney naturally replied that no 
one but the author himself could make such a remark 
as that. Lee started. " I have unguardedly committed 
myself," said he, " and it would be folly to deny you 
that I am the author ; but I must request you will not 
reveal it during my life, for it never was and never will 
be revealed by me to any other." Lee then went on 
to point out several circumstances corroborative of his 
claim. Such a statement, from a gentleman of such 
high character as Mr. Rodney, at once attracted atten- 
tion in Europe and America. Two intimate friends 
of Lee maintained opposite sides of the question. 
Ralph Wormeley of Virginia published a letter in 
which he argued that Lee was very far from possessing 
the knowledge of parliamentary history exhibited in 
the pages of "Junius." Daniel McCarthy of North 
Carolina published a series of articles in the Virginia 
■Gazette in refutation of Wormeley. Dr. Thomas 
Girdlestone of Yarmouth, England, followed on the 
same side in a small volume entitled, " Facts tending 
to prove that General Lee was never absent from this 
country for any length of time during the years 1767— 
1772, and that he was the author of ' Junius.' " This 
curious, little book was published in London in 181 3. 
The first part of Dr. Girdlestone's title points to the 
fatal obstacle to his hypothesis. The simple fact is 
that Lee was absent in such remote countries as 



THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 97 

Poland and Turkey at the very dates when " Junius " 
was publishing letters exhibiting such minute and 
detailed acquaintance with affairs every day occurring 
in London as could only have been possessed by an 
eye-witness living on the spot. This fact makes it 
impossible that he should have written the " Letters 
of Junius"; and Mr. Rodney's statement only goes to 
show that, in other than military matters, the soldier 
of fortune was willing to claim what did not belong to 
him. 

Such was the man to whom some of our great- 
grandfathers were at times almost ready to intrust the 
destinies of their country rather than to George 
Washington ! When we consider how narrowly the 
cause of American independence escaped total 
wreck at the hands of this unprincipled adventurer, 
the thought is enough to make us shudder after 
the hundred years that have passed. In judging the 
character of the man, there may be found some who 
would urge that his eccentricities were so marked as 
perhaps to afford some ground for the plea of insanity 
whereby to palliate his misdemeanours. One will not 
grudge him the benefit of such a plea, in so far as it 
may have any value. His mind was no doubt ill 
balanced, or, to use one of his own favourite words, it 
was " unhinged " by colossal vanity and ravening self- 
ishness ; and accordingly, what chiefly strikes us now 
in reviewing his career is the contrast between his 
enormous pretensions and his unparalleled feebleness. 
We shall have to search the field of modern history 
far and wide to find his equal as a charlatan. In 
comparison with such a man even the figure of 
Benedict Arnold acquires dignity. We can imagine 



98 CHARLES LEE 

the latter admired and trusted in some circles of the 
lower world. But Charles Lee belongs rather to that 
limbo described by Dante as the final home of those 
caitiff souls a Dio spiacenti ed ai nemici sui^ too 
wicked for the one place, too weak for the other. 



Ill 

ALEXANDER HAMILTON 
AND THE FEDERALIST PARTY 



Ill 

ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

AND THE FEDERALIST PARTY 

The 6th of July, 1774, was a memorable day in the 
history of New York. The question as to how far 
that colony would go in support of Massachusetts in 
its defiance of Parliament was pressing for an answer. 
Parliament had in April passed an act which deprived 
Massachusetts of her charter, and another which shut 
up the port of Boston until the town should see fit to 
pay the East India Company for the tea which had 
been thrown into the harbour. On the ist of June 
Hutchinson had sailed for England, hoping through 
a personal interview with the king to effect a repeal 
of these tyrannical acts, and on the same day Thomas 
Gage, intrusted with the work of enforcing them, as- 
sumed military command over Massachusetts. Troops 
were encamped on Boston Common, frigates rode at 
anchor in the harbour, great merchantmen lay idle at 
the wharves while sailors and shipwrights roamed the 
streets or sat drinking in the taverns. The legislature 
was convened at Salem, where on the 17th Samuel 
Adams achieved a master stroke and carried the reso- 
lutions inviting all the sister colonies to join in a Con- 
tinental Congress, to meet at Philadelphia on the ist 
of September. Rhode Island and Maryland had at 
once elected delegates to attend the proposed Con- 
gress. In Virginia a convention was about to be 

lOI 

tore 



I02 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

held, and such expressions of opinion had come from 
that quarter as to leave no doubt as to what its action 
would be. The time had arrived when New York 
must do something. But what she should do was 
hard to determine, for parties were quite evenly 
balanced. 

The king, indeed, in his harsh measures against 
Massachusetts relied confidently upon the support of 
New York. He believed that his Tory friends there 
were in a decided majority, and they declared there 
would be no Congress. As for New York, they said, 
" She will never appoint delegates ; Massachusetts 
must be made to feel that she is deserted." There 
was something more in this than the old local dislike 
between New York and New England. For thirteen 
years Massachusetts had been suffering acute irrita- 
tion at the hands of crown officers, and her temper 
had thus grown so belligerent that in most parts of 
the country there was a disposition to regard her as 
perhaps a little too obstinate and fierce. There were 
people in New York who thought that both Massa- 
chusetts and the king were going too far, and per- 
suaded themselves that the tea might be paid for 
without surrendering the principles which had led to 
its destruction. Some who were about to become 
eminent as Revolutionary leaders had not yet fully 
made up their minds. Tory politicians led in the 
Committee of Correspondence, and on the 4th of July, 
while it was decided to take part in the Congress, on 
the other hand the delegation which was appointed 
seemed to the extreme Whigs too conservative in 
character. The Sons of Liberty, who feared that 
Massachusetts would not find due support in the Con- 



AND THE FEDERALIST PARTY 1 03 

gress, were well represented in the city of New York. 
At their head were the merchants, Isaac Sears and 
Alexander Macdougall, and the eloquent lawyer, John 
Morin Scott. The Tories used to sneer at these men 
as "the Presbyterian junto." They wished to recon- 
sider the action of the committee, and to make a 
popular demonstration which would go as far as pos- 
sible toward committing New York to espouse the 
cause of Massachusetts. Accordingly, on the 6th of 
July, a great meeting of citizens was held in the fields 
north of the city, with the canny Scotchman, Macdou- 
gall, as chairman. Many eminent speakers addressed 
the meeting, but among the hearers was a lad of 
seventeen years, small and slight in stature, who lis- 
tened with intense eagerness as he felt that, besides all 
that was said, there were other weighty arguments 
which seemed to occur to nobody. At length, unable 
to keep silence any longer, he rose to his feet, and 
somewhat timidly at first, but gathering courage every 
moment, he addressed the astonished company. His 
arguments compelled assent, while his dignified elo- 
quence won admiration, and when he had finished 
there was a buzz of inquiry as to who this extraordi- 
nary boy could be. There were some who had seen 
him walking back and forth under the shade of some 
large trees in Dey Street, absorbed in meditation and 
now and then muttering to himself; a few knew him 
as " the young West Indian " ; on further inquiry, it 
appeared that he was a student at King's College, and 
his name was Alexander Hamilton. 

Instances of marvellous precocity are more often 
found in mathematics, or linguistics, or music, than in 
political science ; for in the latter case something 



I04 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

more than consecutive thinking or tenacious memory 
or a fine artistic sense are required ; there is needed 
an insight into human nature and the conditions of 
human Hfe such as can hardly be acquired save by 
long years of experience. Seldom has there been 
such a case as that of Hamilton. His intellect 
seemed to have sprung forth in full maturity, like 
Pallas from the brain of Zeus. What little is known 
of his childhood and youth can be told in few words. 
Alexander Hamilton was born upon the island of 
Nevis, in the West Indies, on the nth of January, 
1757. His father belonged to the famous Scottish 
family of the Hamiltons of Grange, his mother was 
daughter of a Huguenot gentleman named Fawcette, 
who had fled to the West Indies after the revocation 
of the Edict of Nantes. He was equally at home in 
the English and French languages. His father fell 
into financial difficulties, and his mother died during 
his childhood, so that he was placed at school at Santa 
Cruz under the care of some of her relatives. His 
school studies were accompanied by a wide course of 
miscellaneous reading, assisted by the advice of Dr. 
Hugh Knox, a kindly and sagacious Presbyterian 
minister and a graduate of Princeton. Before his 
thirteenth birthday he entered the counting-house of 
Nicholas Cruger, a merchant, who carried on a very 
considerable business. Here his wonderful precocity 
soon showed itself. Business letters of his, written at 
that period, have been preserved which would do 
credit to a trained business man ; and before the boy 
had been a year in the house, his employer, having 
occasion to leave the island, intrusted its entire man- 
agement to him. In spite of this extraordinary apti- 



AND THE FEDERALIST PARTY 105 

tude, for the work he felt no special fondness. In a 
letter dated just two months before he was thirteen, 
he thus unbosomed himself to a schoolmate : " To 
confess my weakness, Ned, my ambition is prevalent, 
so that I contemn the grovelling ambition of a clerk, 
or the like, to which my fortune condemns me, and 
would willingly risk my life, though not my character, 
to exalt my station. I am confident, Ned, that my 
youth excludes me from any hope of immediate pre- 
ferment, nor do I desire it ; but I mean to prepare the 
way for futurity. I'm no philosopher, you see, and 
may be justly said to build castles in the air; my 
folly makes me ashamed, and beg you'll conceal it. 
Yet, Neddy, we have seen such schemes successful, 
when the projector is constant. I shall conclude by 
saying, I wish there was a war." 

The reading of Plutarch has awakened generous 
ambition in many a youthful mind. Hamilton " pre- 
pared the way for futurity " by studying and com- 
menting upon this author, and by trying his hand 
at literary composition. In August, 1772, the island 
was visited by a terrible hurricane ; and a remarkable 
description of it, published in a newspaper at St. 
Christopher, attracted general attention throughout 
the British West Indies. The authorship was traced 
to Hamilton ; it was decided that such literary talent 
required wider opportunities than were furnished on 
the islands; the needful funds were raised by sub- 
scription ; and before the end of October the boy's 
romantic temperament was at once gratified and 
stimulated, as he found himself on board ship headed 
for Boston, with potent letters of introduction from 
Dr. Knox in his pocket. The connection with this 



I06 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

Presbyterian divine led him to New Jersey, where 
he entered a grammar school at Elizabethtown, and 
for a while made his home in the house of William 
Livingston. There he was introduced to the best 
society, and met many good friends, among them 
John Jay, who was soon to marry one of the four 
charming daughters. A full year had not passed 
when he was declared fit to enter Princeton, and he 
called upon Dr. Witherspoon, the able president, 
with the request that he might be allowed to ad- 
vance toward his degree as fast as he could pass 
the examinations, and without regard to the pre- 
scribed curriculum. When the request was refused 
by the trustees as vain and unreasonable, he re- 
paired to New York, and succeeded in entering 
King's College (now Columbia) upon his own 
terms. 

This was late in the autumn of 1773, the stirring 
season of the Boston Tea Party. Hamilton's wish 
for a war was soon to be gratified. His childhood 
had been passed in an atmosphere of loyalism; he 
knew little as yet of American politics; his instincts 
were then, as always, in favour of strong government, 
and opposed to anything that looked like insurrec- 
tion, and his first impressions leaned toward the Tory 
side. But he had hardly been six months at college 
when he happened to visit Boston, about the time 
when news arrived of the vindictive acts of Parlia- 
ment and the appointment of a military governor. 
It was a good place and a good time for comprehend- 
ing the true character of the political situation. The 
young man mastered the arguments with his usual 
swiftness and thoroughness, and returned to New 



AND THE FEDERALIST PARTY 107 

York in time to exert a powerful influence upon the 
great assemblage in the fields. The practical result 
of the meeting was seen a few weeks later, when the 
delecjates embarked at Cortlandt Street to the sound 
of drum and trumpet, pledged to " support at the risk 
of everything dear" such resolutions as the Conti- 
nental Congress might see fit to adopt. 

Soon after the Congress had adjourned in October, 
to await the results of its action upon the British gov- 
ernment, its proceedings were adversely criticised in 
two able pamphlets written jointly by two Episcopal 
clergymen, the famous Samuel Seabury, afterward 
Bishop of Connecticut, and Isaac Wilkins of West- 
chester County. The pamphlets, which purported to 
come from " A Westchester Farmer," cast dismay into 
the ranks of the Whigs. They were extremely plau- 
sible, and were already making converts, when within 
a fortnight there appeared an anonymous tract in 
vindication of Congress, which at once threw the 
" Farmer " upon the defensive, and rufBed his temper 
withal, as his next pamphlet showed. The anony- 
mous wTiter returned to the charge with a voluminous 
essay quite properly entitled " The Farmer Refuted " ; 
it completely unhorsed and disarmed the adversary; 
the two ministers had no more to say. Great curios- 
ity was felt as to the anonymous writer. Some thought 
it must be Jay, others his father-in-law, Livingston. 
When it was at length ascertained that it was a boy 
of eighteen, and the same boy that had addressed the 
meetings in the fields, the astonishment was profound. 
There was no trace of immaturity in thought or ex- 
pression in his two essays, and their boldness of tone 
was accompanied by a grasp of the political situation 



I08 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

that must seem even more remarkable to-day than it 
did at the time, since we can appreciate the writer's 
foresight as contemporaries necessarily could not. At 
the beginning of 1775 very few leaders, even in Mas- 
sachusetts or Virginia, were in favour of independence. 
The author of " The Farmer Refuted " hints at inde- 
pendence as the possible outcome of the quarrel, indi- 
cates a Fabian military policy as most likely to baffle 
Great Britain, and surmises that France and even 
Spain might find it for their interest to take part in 
the struggle. That such advanced views could have 
been even suggested without weakening the effect of 
the pamphlet shows a tact and an artfulness of state- 
ment not less remarkable than the other qualities of 
the young writer. 

It was not long before the news of Lexington 
wrought the excitement in New York to fever heat. 
There were street fights between Tories and Whigs, 
and here Hamilton's hatred of anarchy was well illus- 
trated. To him independence was one thing, mob 
law quite another. A party of rioters beset the house 
of Dr. Cooper, the Tory president of the college, with 
intent to seize him and in some way maltreat him. 
Hamilton got into the foremost rank of the crowd till 
he reached the door-step, then faced about and ad- 
dressed the rioters, and held them at bay while the 
doctor escaped through the back garden and took 
refuge on the deck of a British seventy-four. Pres- 
ently, when Isaac Sears raised a troop of horse over in 
Connecticut and dashed into New York at their head 
to attack Rivington's Tory printing-press, Hamilton 
incurred no little risk in confronting them with argu- 
ments and expostulations. The press was destroyed 



AND THE FEDERALIST PARTY 109 

and the Tory type carried off to Connecticut to be 
melted into Whig bullets.^ 

By this time the boy was ranked among the leading 
spirits of the Whig party. He had already begun to 
study the military art, and now joined a corps of young 
men, chiefly college students, known as " Hearts of 
Oak." They wore green coats and leather caps 
adorned with the motto, " Freedom or Death," and 
they were drilled and paraded daily until they became 
a model of discipline. On the 14th of March, 1776, 
Hamilton was appointed captain of the first company 
of artillery raised by the state. Presently the thorough- 
ness of its drill and the grace of its movements caught 
the keen eye of that great genius and eager military 
student, Nathanael Greene, who arrived in New York 
on the 1 7th of April. Greene was so impressed that 
he sought Hamilton's acquaintance and spoke of him 
enthusiastically to Washington. The young captain 
and his company did good service at the battle of 
Long Island and the retreat which followed ; and 
again at White Plains and Trenton and Princeton. 
On the ist of March, 1777, he accepted a position on 
Washington's staff, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. 
It was with some reluctance that he took this place, 
for he had been looking forward to promotion in the 
line ; but what he lost in one direction he probably 
more than gained in another, through the peculiarly 
intimate relations into which he entered with Wash- 
ington. His great work was to be, not that of a 
general, but of a statesman ; and there was no place 
more favourable than Washington's staff for studying 
minutely into the causes of the miserable weakness 

^ Morse's "Hamilton," I. 19. 



no ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

which the imperfect union between the states entailed 
upon the whole country, or for discussing the most 
proper measures for remedying this condition of affairs 
through the establishment of a more perfect union. 
The impossibility of raising a national revenue, save 
from precarious foreign loans or the wretched expedi- 
ent of issuing promissory notes without any discover- 
able means of paying them, was a source of perpetual 
anxiety to the commander-in-chief. The consequences 
of this poverty were daily brought home to his head- 
quarters in the dif^culty of enlisting troops, or of sup- 
plying them with clothing and ammunition, or of 
paying them even a small instalment of wages over- 
due. At the end of the war there was no one who 
could have told better than Hamilton how hard it had 
sometimes proved to keep the army from melting away, 
or how many times some promising military scheme 
had been nipped in the bud for want of supplies, while 
men in Congress and in the state legislatures were 
wondering why Washington could not march without 
shoes, sup without food, fight v/ithout powder, and 
defeat a well-equipped and well-fed enemy that out- 
numbered him two to one. No one understood better 
than Hamilton that, but for the radical want of 
efficiency in the government of the confederation, 
such obstacles would have been far less formidable, 
and the enemy might much sooner have been driven 
from the country. No doubt the daily intercourse for 
four years between Washington and his confidential 
aide added much to the strength of both, and to the 
effectiveness with which they were afterward able to 
reenforce one another in contributing to found a better 
government. Almost from the outset Washington 



AND THE FEDERALIST PARTY III 

consulted Hamilton more frequently than the other 
members of his staff and intrusted the most weighty- 
affairs to his charge. It was remarkable that this 
preference, accorded to so young a man, should have 
excited no jealousy. But the " little lion," as the older 
officers called him, was so frank and good-natured, so 
buoyant and brave, and so free from arrogance, that he 
won all the hearts. There was a mixture in him of 
Scottish shrewdness with French vivacity that most 
people found irresistible. Knox and Laurens, Lafay- 
ette and Steuben, loved him with devoted affection. 

Along with the desire to please, which was one 
secret of his attractiveness, there was a due amount 
of sternness latent, as appeared when occasion called 
for it. If necessary, the " little lion " could com- 
mand in a tone that made weaker creatures tremble. 
All his tact and all his imperiousness were required 
on his mission to Saratoga after Burgoyne's sur- 
render, to get back the troops which Washington 
had sent to Gates and which the latter no loneer 
needed. Gates was more than ready to leave Wash- 
ington in the lurch, as Charles Lee had done the year 
before. In Congress there was so strong a party 
opposed to Washington that to offend his unscrupu- 
lous rival while all the glamour of victory surrounded 
him would not be timely. The skill with which this 
young man, not yet one-and-twenty, wrested the troops 
from the reluctant Gates, peremptorily asserting Wash- 
ington's claim, yet never allowing the affair to develop 
into a quarrel, was simply marvellous. 

As a staff officer Hamilton was present at the bat- 
tles of the Brandywine, Germantown, and Monmouth ; 
he was Colonel Laurens's second in the duel between 



112 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

that officer and Charles Lee ; and at West Point he 
was the first to receive and read the papers taken from 
Andre's stockings and containing the melancholy proofs 
of Arnold's treason. He saw much of Andre and of 
Mrs. Arnold, and his letters give a most touching 
description of the affair. Soon after this his connec- 
tion with Washington's staff came abruptly to an end. 
On the 1 6th of February, 1 781, as Washington was 
going up the stairs at his headquarters at New Wind- 
sor, he met Hamilton coming down and told him that 
he wished to speak to him. Hamilton, who was on his 
way downstairs to deliver an important order, replied 
that he would return in a moment. On his way back 
he was met by Lafayette, who accosted him on some 
pressing matter of business. In his impatience to 
return upstairs he cut Lafayette short in a manner 
which, as he says, but for their intimacy would have 
been more than abrupt. He was not aware of having 
consumed more than two minutes altogether, but 
when he reached the head of the staircase he found 
Washington waiting there, and these words were 
exchanged : — 

" Colonel Hamilton, you have kept me waiting at 
the head of the stairs these ten minutes. I must tell 
you, sir, you treat me with disrespect." 

" I am not conscious of it, sir ; but since you have 
thought it necessary to tell me so, we part." 

" Very well, sir, if it be your choice." 

And so they parted. At first sight the breaking of 
such an important relation on such a slight occasion 
seems silly, and Hamilton's reply to his commander 
childishly petulant. But Washington's temper was 
hasty. That he believed himself to have reproved his 



AND THE FEDERALIST PARTY II3 

young friend unjustly was shown by his sending an 
aide to him a few moments afterward, with what was 
virtually an apology and a request that he would 
reconsider his decision. Hamilton, however, had for 
some time wished to leave the staff for a place in the 
line, and now that the matter had taken this shape 
he preferred to let it remain so. Any resentment he 
expressly disclaimed, and it does not appear that the 
cordial friendship between the two men was in the 
least disturbed by this little episode. Hamilton pres- 
ently obtained the opportunity which he coveted, and 
in the Yorktown campaign commanded a body of 
light infantry in Lafayette's division, at the head of 
which he stormed one of the British redoubts with 
signal valour. This was the end of his military career. 
On his mission to General Gates he had become ac- 
quainted with Elizabeth, daughter of General Schuy- 
ler, and their marriage took place on the 14th of 
December, 1780. In the spring of 1782, as soon as 
it became evident that the war was over, Hamilton 
removed to Albany, and in July was admitted to the 
bar. 

Other business than law practice, however, came up 
to occupy his attention. We have seen how forcibly 
the weakness of the government and the need for 
revenue had been brought home to Washington's staff 
officer. He had pondered deeply on these subjects, 
and had already conceived the scheme of an alliance 
of interests between the federal government and the 
moneyed class of society. One of the instruments by 
which the alliance was to be effected was a national 
bank, which was to be a corporation in private hands, 
but to some extent supported and controlled by Con- 



iI4 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

gress. He also advocated extending the powers of 
the federal government and placing the departments 
of war and finance in the hands of individuals instead 
of committees. His views made a great impression 
upon Robert Morris, who was appointed in 1781 
superintendent of finance. In December of that year 
the Bank of North America was established, and 
Hamilton must share with Robert and Gouverneur 
Morris the authorship of that scheme. About the 
time he entered the bar he was appointed continental 
receiver of taxes for the state of New York. In that 
capacity he visited the legislature at Poughkeepsie, 
had an earnest conference with a committee of both 
houses, and presently the legislature actually passed 
resolutions callino^ for a convention of all the states 
for the purpose of enlarging the powers of Congress, 
especially with regard to taxation. Nothing ever 
came of this action, but in view of the subsequent 
course of New York, it is remarkable that Hamilton's 
first attempt should have succeeded so well. But 
there can be little doubt that between 1782 and 1788 
the politics of New York were somewhat corrupted by 
her custom-house. In the general confusion she found 
herself prospering at the expense of her neighbours, 
and the strength of the Anti-federalist or Clintonian 
party was naturally increased by that circumstance; 
it would have been so in any state. 

In October, 1782, the New York legislature chose 
Hamilton as one of its delegates to Congress. There 
he first came into familiar contact with Madison, and 
met James Wilson, with others of less note ; and there 
he witnessed some months of barren and almost 
purposeless wrangling which convinced him that 



AND THE FEDERALIST PARTY II5 

nothing was to be hoped from any attempt at reform 
which should stop short with the mere amending of 
the confederation ; it must be entirely superseded by 
a stronger government. On every proposal which 
looked toward amendment he took the affirmative and 
argued with his accustomed power that nothing was 
accomplished. This winter's experience doubtless in- 
creased his disgust at the jealousies and the perpetual 
jarring between the states. Hamilton's own position 
was peculiar in so far as he was not a native of any one 
of the states, and had from his first connection with 
public affairs felt more interest in the country as a 
whole than in any part of it. His attitude, therefore, 
was such as to enable him to move much more freely 
and directly toward the construction of a national 
government than any of his contemporaries. Another 
effect of so much fruitless discussion may well have 
been to confirm his distrust of popular government. 
For what an Athenian would have called the rule of 
the many-headed King Demos he never had much 
liking. He could see much more clearly than the 
men around him many of the things that were needed 
and the most efficient means for obtaining them ; and 
there was in his temperament an impatience and an 
imperiousness that made him irk at the dulness of his 
fellow-creatures and the length of time required to set 
their common sense to work in the right direction. 
He was a devoted friend to free government; not, 
however, to that kind of free government in which the 
people rule, but the kind in which they are ruled by 
an upper class, with elaborate safeguards against the 
abuse of power. To such views Hamilton was pre- 
disposed by nature; his intimate experience of the 



Il6 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

contrast between Washington's efficiency and the in- 
efficiency of Congress had done much to confirm 
them ; his own winter of hard work in Congress no 
doubt confirmed them still more. Every man has the 
defects of his excellences, and this element of narrow- 
ness in Hamilton's view of popular government was 
closely related to the qualities that made him so pre- 
eminent as a constructive thinker. 

One winter of such hopeless work was for the 
present enough for Hamilton. In 1783 he returned 
to the practice of law and began rising rapidly at the 
bar. Even in his professional practice he had an 
opportunity to figure as a defender of the federal 
government against the state sovereignty. Just as it 
was in later years with Daniel Webster, his first 
famous law case stood in a noticeable relation to his 
career as a statesman. Hamilton was honourably dis- 
tinguished for his vigorous condemnation of the cruel 
and silly persecution to which the Tories, especially 
in New York, were subjected after the close of the 
war. His first great case, in 1784, was one in which 
the treaty obligations of the United States to protect 
the Tories from further abuse came into conflict with 
a persecuting act which the New York legislature had 
lately passed against such people. There was then 
no federal Supreme Court, or any other federal court, 
in which such questions could be settled. The case 
was one which must begin and end in the state courts 
of New York, and its bearing upon the political ques- 
tion was rather implied than asserted. It was a case 
in which, if the state law were upheld, a poor widow 
would recover property of which the vicissitudes of 
war deprived her ; but if the state law were set aside, a 



AND THE FEDERALIST PARTY 11/ 

mass of spoliation would be prevented in comparison 
with which the widow's affair was the veriest trifle. 
Popular sympathy was wholly with the widow and 
against her Tory opponent, and in acting as counsel 
for the latter Hamilton showed such moral courage as 
had hardly been called for in any law case since John 
Adams and Josiah Quincy defended the British soldiers 
concerned in the so-called Boston Massacre. That he 
should have won his case against a hostile court, in 
such a moment of popular excitement, was hardly to 
be expected. That he did win it, and in so doing 
overturn the state law in question, was a marvellous 
feat, — the strongest proof one could wish of his 
unrivalled power as an advocate. The decision of the 
court was followed by a war of pamphlets in which 
Hamilton again won the day, and went far toward 
changing the public sentiment. At this moment there 
entered upon his life the ominous shadow of the duel, 
that social pest, which by and by, under other circum- 
stances and at other hands, was to cut him off in the 
very prime of his powers and usefulness. A club of 
blatant pothouse politicians proposed to take turns in 
calling him out until some one of them should have 
the good fortune to kill him ; but the wild scheme 
came to naught. 

Two more years elapsed while Hamilton was en- 
gaged in professional work, and then Virginia, under 
the lead of Madison, called for a convention of all the 
states at Annapolis, to consider the feasibility of estab- 
lishing a uniform system of commercial regulations 
for the whole country. Here Hamilton saw his oppor- 
tunity, and succeeded in getting New York to appoint 
delegates, with himself among them. When the con- 



Il8 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

vention met in September, 1 786, only five states were 
represented, so that the only thing worth while to do 
was to try again and call another convention. It was 
Hamilton who wrote the address calling for a conven- 
tion at Philadelphia, to meet in the following May, to 
consider the best means of clothing the federal gov- 
ernment with powers adequate for the maintenance of 
order and the preservation of the Union. It was high 
time for such work to be undertaken, for the whole 
country was falling under the sway of the lord of mis- 
rule. Congress was bankrupt, foreign nations were 
scoffing at us, Connecticut had barely escaped from war 
with Pennsylvania and New York from New Hamp- 
shire, there were riots and bloodshed in Vermont, 
Rhode Island seemed on the verge of civil war, Mas- 
sachusetts was actually engaged in suppressing armed 
rebellion, Connecticut and New Jersey were threat- 
ening commercial non-intercourse with New York. 
Spain was defying us at the mouth of the Mississippi, 
and a party in Virginia was entertaining the idea of a 
separate Southern confederacy. Under such circum- 
stances it was necessary to act quickly, and it was 
Hamilton's business to see that New York was repre- 
sented in the convention. To that end he succeeded 
in getting elected to the legislature, and spent the win- 
ter in a hard fight against the party that was opposed 
to a clear union of the states. That party was very 
strong. At its head was the governor, George Clinton, 
who preferred to remain the most powerful citizen of 
New York rather than occupy a subordinate place 
under a national government in which his own state 
was not foremost. The policy of local high tariffs 
directed against the neighbouring states had been 



AND THE FEDERALIST PARTY II9 

temporarily successful, although it was already threat- 
ening New York with a war. Though some of the 
most intelligent people in the state understood the 
shortsightedness of the governor's policy, the multitude 
were always ready to throw up their caps and shout, 
" Hurrah for Clinton ! " It was this unreasoning pop- 
ular support that made Clinton at that moment the 
most formidable enemy then living in the United 
States to all schemes and movements that tended 
toward a closer union. Here again the circumstances 
were such as naturally to strengthen Hamilton's hatred 
of democracy. Here was democracy confronting him 
with intent to thwart and prevent the work to which 
he had now come to consecrate his life. 

This was a hot fight. At length Hamilton, with the 
valuable aid of Schuyler and the Livingstons, won a 
victory, such as it was. Delegates were indeed chosen, 
so that New York was not unrepresented in the con- 
vention, like Rhode Island. Hamilton was one of 
these delegates, so that he was to have a chance to 
express his views and make his influence felt. But 
every effort to obtain more than three delegates was 
voted down, and Hamilton's two colleagues, Robert 
Yates and John Lansing, were uncompromising Anti- 
federalists, so that it was perfectly certain that he 
would never succeed in the convention in carrying the 
vote of New York for one single measure looking 
toward the fulfilment of the objects for which that 
convention had been called. 

Thus hampered, the share which Hamilton took in the 
debates of the convention was a small one. He could 
only express his individual preferences, well knowing 
that as soon as it came to a vote his two colleagues 



I20 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

would overrule him. To have disputed every point 
would simply have emphasized the fact that he did not 
really represent his own state, and would thus have 
impaired his usefulness. So he threw all his force into 
one great speech. Early in the proceedings, after vari- 
ous plans of government had been laid before the 
convention, he took the occasion to present his own 
view of the general subject. Only an outline of his 
speech, which took five hours in delivery, has been 
preserved. Gouverneur Morris said it was the most 
impressive speech he ever heard in his life. In the 
course of it Hamilton read his own carefully prepared 
plan, of which we need only notice the two cardinal 
features. First, he would have had the President and 
senators elected by persons possessed of a certain 
amount of landed property, and he would have had 
them hold office for life or during good behaviour. This 
would have created an aristocratic republic, as near to 
an elective monarchy with a life peerage as one could 
very well get. Secojidly, he would have aimed a death- 
blow, not merely at state sovereignty, but at state rights, 
by giving the President the appointment of the several 
state governors, who were to have a veto on the acts of 
their legislatures. If such a measure as this had been 
adopted, the Union in all probability would not have 
lasted a dozen years. The position of a governor ap- 
pointed by any power outside the state would have 
borne altogether too much likeness to the position of 
the royal governors before the Revolution. The will 
of the people, as expressed by the state legislature, 
would have been liable at any moment to be overruled 
by a governor who, whether a native of the state or not, 
would have owed his position to considerations which 



AND THE FEDERALIST PARTY 121 

might be antagonistic to the poHcy of the state. The 
clashing between imperial and local interests might 
not have been so violent as before the Revolution, but 
there would have been so much to remind people of 
the old state of things that the new government would 
have been discredited from the start. 

It seems clear, then, that in this suggestion Hamil- 
ton did not show his wonted sagacity. He failed to 
understand what was really sound and valuable in 
state rights, and this was not at all strange in a man 
who, having been born outside of the United States, 
was at this very moment contending against the ex- 
treme state sovereignty doctrines of New York and 
her narrow-minded governor. 

Fortunately, however, there was not the slightest 
chance of Hamilton's extreme views prevailing in the 
convention, and this he knew as well as any one. His 
suggestions, it was said, were praised by everybody, 
but followed by no one. Presently urgent business 
called him home, and his two colleagues quit the con- 
vention in disgust, so that New York was left without 
representation there. Toward the close he returned 
to Philadelphia, and when the draft of the federal 
Constitution was completed, he made an eloquent 
speech, urging all the delegates to sign it. No man's 
ideas, he said, could be more remote from the plan 
than his were known to be ; but was it possible for a 
true patriot to deliberate between anarchy and civil 
war, on the one side, and the chance of good to be ex- 
pected from this plan, on the other? This was the 
spirit of the true statesman, and in this spirit he signed 
alone for New York. 

The " Empire State " has had many illustrious citi- 



122 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

zens, but to none does she owe such a debt of gratitude 
as to Alexander Hamilton for inscribing her name on 
this immortal record. In the desperate struggle which 
followed, every inch of ground once gained counted 
as a victory ; and it was much that when the Constitu- 
tion was first published to the world the name of New 
York was attached to it. 

In the ten months which followed the close of the 
convention we see Hamilton at the most interesting 
period of his life. Still buoyant with youthful energy, 
just finishing his thirty-first year, his rare flexibility of 
mind was now most strikingly illustrated. Like a wise 
statesman, when he could not get the whole loaf, he 
made the most that he could out of the half. His 
noble, disinterested patriotism„not content with leading 
him to sign a constitution of which he only half ap- 
proved, now urged him to defend it with matchless 
ability in the papers which make up that immortal 
volume, the " Federalist." The Constitution, as finally 
adopted by the convention, was very far from being 
the work of any one man, but Madison's share in fram- 
ing it had been very great, and it represented his theory 
of government much more nearly than Hamilton's. 
The thoroughness, however, with which Hamilton 
made the whole work his own, is well illustrated by 
the difficulty in deciding from internal evidence what 
parts of the " Federalist " were written by him and what 
parts by Madison. In the controversy which has been 
waged upon this question, it has been shown that we 
can seldom light upon such distinctive features of treat- 
ment and style as to lead to a sure conclusion. This 
shows how completely the two writers were for the 
moment at one, and it shows Hamilton's marvellous 



AND THE FEDERALIST PARTY 1 23 

adaptability. It also illustrates one characteristic of 
his style. Had he been endowed with a gorgeous 
poetical imagination like Burke, or had he been a 
master of rhetoric in the same sense as Webster, there 
could never have been any difficulty in distinguishing 
between his writing and Madison's. But Hamilton's 
style was a direct appeal to man's reason ; and the 
wonder of it was that he could accomplish by such a 
direct appeal what most men cannot accomplish with- 
out calling into play the various arts of the rhetorician. 
To make a bare statement of facts and conclusions in 
such a way that unwilling minds cannot choose but 
accept them is a rare gift indeed. But while this was 
Hamilton's secret, it was to some extent Madison's 
also. Though a much less brilliant man in many 
ways, in this one respect Madison approached Hamil- 
ton, though he did not quite equal him. Hence, as it 
seems to me, the general similarity of style through- 
out the disputed numbers of the " Federalist." 

As the speeches in Xenophon's " Anabasis " give one 
a very brief opinion of the intelligence of the Greek 
soldiers to whom such arguments might even be sup- 
posed to be addressed, so the essays in the " Federalist " 
give one a very high opinion of the intelligence of our 
great-grandfathers. The American people have never 
received a higher compliment than in having had such 
a book addressed to them. That they deserved it was 
shown by the effect produced, and it is in this dem- 
ocratic appeal to the general intelligence that we get 
the pleasantest impression of Hamilton's power. 

The most remarkable exhibition of it, however, was 
in the state convention at Poughkeepsie, in June and 
July, 1788, for considering the question as to ratifying 



124 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

the federal Constitution. Ten of the thirteen states 
had now ratified it, or one more than the number 
necessary for putting it into operation. The laggards 
were New York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island. 
The latter state, isolated between her two stronger 
neighbours, might be left out of account for the 
moment, and so might North Carolina, for owing to 
the slavery compromises South Carolina had become 
intensely Federalist, a fact of cardinal importance in 
the history of the next thirty years. But as for New 
York, she could not for a moment be disregarded. 
Though not yet one of the greatest states, her position 
made her supremely important. It had been so in 
the days of Stuyvesant, and of Frontenac, and of 
Montcalm, and of Burgoyne ; and just so it was in the 
days of George Clinton. If he could have carried his 
point, our federal Union, cut in twain by the Mohawk 
and Hudson valleys, would have had but a short life. 
That he did not carry it was mainly due to Hamilton's 
wonderful power of striking directly home at the sober 
reason of his fellow-men. It is not so very often that 
we see one man convince another by sheer argument. 
When passions and prejudices are enlisted, it is seldom 
that either side will budge an inch. The more they 
argue the more obstinate they grow, and if the affair 
gets settled, it is usually by some sort of compromise, 
in which each side tries to comfort itself with the 
belief that it has overreached the other. In the New 
York convention of 1 788 there was no chance for com- 
promise ; the question as to ratifying the constitution 
must be answered with Yes or No ; and if the vote had 
been taken at the beginning two-thirds of the members 
would have voted No. At the head of the Anti-feder- 



AND THE FEDERALIST PARTY 1 25 

alist forces was Melanchthon Smith, an extremely able 
debater, no mean antagonist even for Hamilton. He 
must have been a man of rare candour, too, for after 
weeks of debate he owned himself convinced. The 
Clintonian ranks were thus fatally broken, and the 
decisive vote showed a narrow majority of three in 
favour of the Constitution. Seldom, indeed, has the 
human tongue won such a victory. It was the Water- 
loo of Anti-federalism. In the festivities that followed 
in the city of New York, when the emblematic federal 
ship — the ship of state — was drawn through the 
streets, it was with entire justice that the name of 
Hamilton was emblazoned upon her side. 

A new chapter was now to begin in Hamilton's 
career. President Washington, in endeavouring to 
represent in his cabinet the nation rather than a party, 
selected Jefferson as his Secretary of State and Ham- 
ilton as his Secretary of the Treasury. Nothing but 
strife could come out of such relations between two 
such powerful and antagonistic natures. The dissen- 
sions between the two leaders and the great division 
between American parties arose gradually but rapidly, 
as Hamilton's bold, aggressive financial policy declared 
itself. It was a time when bold measures were needed. 
At home and abroad American credit was dead, be- 
cause the Continental Congress had no power to tax 
the people and therefore could get no money to pay 
its debts. Now, under the new Constitution the House 
of Representatives could tax the people, and the 
problem for Hamilton was to suggest the best means 
of using this new, unfamiliar, and unpopular power, so 
as to obtain a steady revenue from the very start with- 
out arousing too much hostility. A preliminary part 



126 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

of the problem was to decide what was to be done 
with the mass of public debt already incurred. There 
were three kinds of such debt. First, there were the 
sums due to foreign governments for money lent to 
the United States for carrying on the War of Inde- 
pendence. Everybody agreed that this class of debts 
must be paid to the uttermost farthing. Secondly, 
there were the debts due to American citizens who 
had invested their money in Continental securities. 
Hamilton's proposal that these should be paid in full, 
interest as well as principal, met with some opposition. 
In the chaos which had hitherto prevailed, such 
securities had fallen greatly in value, and the first 
glimmer of a better state of things showed that specula- 
tors had been buying them up in hopes of a rise. It 
was now argued that, by redeeming all such securities 
at their full value, the government would be benefiting 
the speculators rather than repaying the original in- 
vestors. But Hamilton understood clearly that, with 
nations as with individuals, credit can be maintained 
only by paying one's debts in full, without asking what 
is going to become of the money. After some dis- 
cussion this view prevailed in Congress. 

Over the third class of debts there was a fierce dis- 
pute. These were the debts owed by the several state 
governments to private citizens. Much distress had 
ensued from the inability of the states to discharge 
these obligations. The discontent in Massachusetts, 
which had culminated in Shays's rebellion, was partly 
traceable to such a cause. On every side creditors 
were clamorous. Nothing would go so far toward 
strengthening the new government as to allay this 
agitation and awaken a feeling of confidence in busi- 



AND THE FEDERALIST PARTY 1 27 

ness circles. To this end Hamilton came forth with 
a measure of startling boldness. He proposed that 
the federal government should assume all these state 
debts and pay them, principal and interest ! 

This was no doubt a master stroke of policy. It 
was one of the most important steps taken by Wash- 
ington's administration toward setting the new govern- 
ment fairly upon its feet. Had it not been for this act 
of assumption state creditors would have been so jeal- 
ous of national creditors, there would have been such 
a jumble of clashing interests, that no steady financial 
policy could have been carried out, and people would 
soon have been impatiently asking wherein was the 
new government any better than the old. But by this 
act of assumption all public creditors, from Maine to 
Georgia, were at once made national creditors, and all 
immediately began to feel a personal interest in 
strengthening the federal government. This measure 
of Hamilton's was as shrewd as his idea of having 
governors appointed by the President had been fool- 
ish. That, if adopted, would have sought to drive 
men ; this was an attempt to draw them. 

It was Hamilton's proposal for the assumption of 
the state debts that originated the first great division 
between political parties under the Constitution. It 
also partly drew the line of division between the 
Northern and the Southern states. In the debates on 
the ratification of the Constitution it did not appear 
that the desire for a more perfect union was any 
stronger at the North than at the South. Virginia was 
scarcely more afraid of centralization than Massa- 
chusetts, and Rhode Island was even more backward 
in ratifying than North Carolina. But the assumption 



128 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

question tended to unite the Northern states in favour 
of a centralizing policy and the Southern states in 
opposition to the same. This was because the great 
majority of the public creditors were to be found 
among Northern capitalists. Hamilton's policy ap- 
pealed directly to their selfish interests, but it did not 
so appeal to the Southern planters. One of the chief 
reasons for Virginia's hesitancy in accepting the Con- 
stitution had been her fear that the commercial North 
might acquire such a majority in Congress as to en- 
able it to tyrannize over the agricultural South. The 
Virginians now denounced the assumption policy as 
unconstitutional, and Hamilton in self-defence was 
obliged to formulate what is known as the doctrine 
of " implied powers." He gave a liberal interpretation 
to that clause in the Constitution (Art I., Sect, viii., 
p. 1 8) which authorized Congress "to make all laws 
which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into 
execution " such powers as are explicitly vested in the 
government of the United States. The opponents of 
a strong government, on the other hand, insisted upon 
a strict and narrow interpretation of that clause ; and 
thus arose that profound antagonism between " strict 
constructionists " and " loose constructionists " which 
has run through the entire political history of the last 
hundred years. As a rule the Republican party of 
Jefferson, with its lineal successor, the Democratic 
party from Jackson to Cleveland, has advocated strict 
construction ; while loose construction has character- 
ized the Federalist party of Hamilton, with its later 
representatives, — the National Republican party of 
Quincy Adams, the Clay and Webster wing of the 
Whig party, and the Republicans of the present day. 



AND THE FEDERALIST PARTY 1 29 

This general rule, however, has been seriously com- 
plicated by the fact that the same party is apt to 
entertain very different views when in power from 
those which it entertains when in opposition. The 
tendency of the party in possession of the govern- 
ment is to interpret its powers liberally, while the 
party in opposition seeks to restrict them. So gen- 
erally has this been the case in American history that 
it would be difficult to lay down any theory of the 
subject which any statesman has consistently applied 
on all occasions. Hamilton, however, was always a 
loose constructionist. As we have seen, the Consti- 
tution was never nearly centralizing enough to suit 
him, and the more powers that could be given to the 
general government, the better he was satisfied. 

The division between North and South on the 
assumption policy was not complete, for here, as on 
most questions previous to 1820, South Carolina was 
on the Federalist side. In this particular instance her 
interests were like those of some of the Northern 
states, for she had a heavy war debt, of which the pro- 
posed measure would relieve her. Even with this 
assistance, however, the bitter fight over assumption 
would have ended in defeat for Hamilton, had not an- 
other fight then raging afforded an opportunity for 
compromise. A new city was about to be designed 
and reared as the Federal capital of the United States, 
and the question was where should it be situated. The 
Northern members of Congress were determined that 
it should not be farther south than the Delaware 
River; the Southern members were equally resolved 
that it should not be farther north than the Potomac ; 
the result was the first, and in some respects the 



130 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

greatest, instance of "log-rolling" known to American 
history. The Northern advocates of assumption car- 
ried their point by yielding to the Southerners in the 
matter of the capital. Congress assumed over 
$20,000,000 of state debts, and the city of Washington 
was built upon the bank of the Potomac. 

This was a great victory for Hamilton, for the Fed- 
eralist party, and for the United States as a nation. It 
certainly required a pretty liberal interpretation of the 
Constitution to justify Congress in assuming these 
debts, but if it had not been done it is very doubtful if 
the Union could long have been held together. We 
must always be grateful to Hamilton for his daring 
and sagacious policy, yet at the same time we must 
acknowledge that the opposition was animated by a 
sound and wholesome feeling. Every day showed 
more clearly that Hamilton's aim was to insure the 
stability of the government through a firm alliance 
with capitalists, and the fear was natural that such a 
policy, if not held in check, might end in transforming 
the government into a plutocracy, — that is to say, a 
government in which political power is monopolized 
by rich men, and employed in furthering their selfish 
interests without regard to the general welfare of the 
people. Those who expressed such a fear were more 
prescient than their Federalist adversaries believed 
them to be ; for now after the lapse of a hundred years 
the gravest danger that threatens us is precisely such 
a plutocracy ! It has been one of our national misfor- 
tunes that for three-quarters of a century the mere 
maintenance of the Union seemed to call for theories 
which when put into operation are very far from mak- 
ing a government that is in the fullest sense " of the 



AND THE FEDERALIST PARTY 131 

people, by the people, and for the people." The only 
party that ever extricated itself from the dilemma, and 
stood at one and the same time unflinchingly for the 
Union and against paternal government in every form, 
was the party of Jackson and Van Buren between 
1830 and 1845. But with Hamilton paternal govern- 
ment was desirable, not only as a means of strengthen- 
ings the Union, but as an end in itself. He believed that 
a part of the people ought to make laws for the whole. 
Having now provided for the complete assumption 
of all debts, domestic and foreign, state and federal, by 
the United States, the next question was how to raise 
the money for discharging them. The new govern- 
ment was regarded with distrust by many people. It 
was feared that the burden of federal taxation would 
be intolerable. Men already found it hard to pay 
taxes to their town, their county, and their state ; how 
could they endure the addition of a fourth tax to the 
list.'* There was but one way to deal with this dififi- 
culty. Probably a general system of direct taxation 
would not have been endured. It was accordingly 
necessary to depend almost entirely upon custom-house 
duties. This gentle, insidious method enables vast 
sums to be taken from people's pockets without their 
so much as suspecting it. It raises prices, that is all ; 
and the dulness of the human mind may be safely 
counted upon, so that when a tax is wrapped up in the 
extra fifty cents charged for a yard of cloth, it is so 
effectually hidden that most people do not know it is 
there. Custom-house duties were accordingly levied, 
and the foreign trade of the United States was already 
so considerable that a large revenue was at once real- 
ized from this source. To win added favour to this 



132 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

policy Hamilton advocated a tariff for what is called 
protection as well as for revenue, although his argu- 
ment fell very short of meeting the exorbitant require- 
ments of the pampered industries of our own time. 
Here, as in his assumption policy, it was Hamilton's 
aim to ally the government with powerful class inter- 
ests. He saw the vast natural resources of the country 
for manufactures, he knew that flourishing industries 
must presently spring up, and he understood how to 
enlist their selfish interests in defence of a liberal con- 
struction of the powers of government. A remarkable 
instance of his foresight was exhibited some years 
afterward in the case of Daniel Webster, who, although 
in principle an advocate of free trade, nevertheless 
succumbed to the protectionists and allied himself 
with them, in order to save the principle of loose con- 
struction and thus leave the general government with 
powers adequate to the paramount purpose of preserv- 
ing the Union. 

The necessity of relying chiefly upon custom-house 
duties was strikingly illustrated by the reception given 
in one part of the country to a direct federal tax. 
Upon distilled Hquors Hamilton thought it right to 
lay a direct excise; but it was with some difficulty 
that he succeeded in getting the measure through 
Congress, and it was no sooner enacted than riotous 
protests began to come from the mountain districts of 
North Carolina, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. The 
highest tax laid on whiskey was only twenty-five cents 
per gallon, but it led to such serious disturbances in 
western Pennsylvania that in the summer of 1794 
President Washington raised an army of 15,000 men 
to deal with them. It was the design of the malcon- 



AND THE FEDERALIST PARTY 1 33 

tents to capture the federal garrison at Pittsburg, 
and then to secede from the Union, together with the 
western counties of Virginia and North Carolina, and 
form an independent state of which the corner-stone 
should be free whiskey. But Washington's action 
was so prompt and his force so overwhelming that 
the rebellion suddenly collapsed without bloodshed. 
Thus the strength of the government was most hap- 
pily asserted and Hamilton's financial policy sustained 
in all particulars. \ 

The completion of Hamilton's general scheme was 
the establishment of a national bank, in which the , 
government was to own a certain portion of the stock, 
and which was to make certain stated loans to the 
government. This was another feature of the alli- 
ance between the government and the moneyed 
classes. Like the other kindred measures, it was 
attacked as unconstitutional, and as in the other cases 
the objection was met by asserting the loose construc- 
tionist theory of the Constitution. Hamilton's finan- 
cial policy was thus in the widest sense a political 
policy. In these methods of obtaining revenue and 
regulating commerce were laid the foundations of the 
whole theory of government upon which our federal 
Union was built up. Their immediate effect in re- 
viving the national credit was marvellous. They met 
with most hearty support in the Northern states, while 
in the purely agricultural state of Virginia they were 
regarded with distrust, and under the leadership of 
Jefferson and Madison there was developed a power- 
ful opposition which was soon to prove wholesome as 
a restraint upon the excesses into which pure federal- 
ism was betrayed. 



134 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

It was the French Revolution and the consequent 
war between France and Great Britain that so reacted 
upon American politics as to bring about the down- 
fall of the Federalist party and hurry to an untimely 
end the career of its illustrious founder. During the 
last decade of the eighteenth century the whole civil- 
ized world seemed bitten with the fierce malady that 
was raging in France. Semel insanivimus omnes. In 
America the excitement soon reached such a point as 
to subordinate all questions of domestic policy ; and 
Hamilton's opponents, foiled in their attempts to de- 
feat his financial measures, were not unwilling to shift 
the scene of battle to the questions connected with 
our foreign relations. It was the aim of the French 
revolutionary party to drag the United States into 
war with Great Britain, but the only sound policy for 
the Americans was that of strict neutrality. The in- 
solence of the British court made this a very difficult 
course to pursue, and probably it would have been 
impossible had not the French in their demands upon 
us shown equal insolence. The pendulum of popular 
feeling in America, under the stimulus of alternate 
insults from London and from Paris, vibrated to and 
fro. The Federalists, as friends of strong government, 
saw in the French convulsions nothing but the orgies 
of a crazy mob ; while on the other hand the Repub- 
licans had a keener appreciation of the vileness of the 
despotism that was being swept away and the whole- 
some nature of the reforms that were being effected 
amid all the horrors and bloodshed. Under the influ- 
ence of such feelings the antagonism between Hamil- 
ton and Jefferson grew into a bitter personal feud, and 
the quarrels in the cabinet were so fierce that Wash- 



AND THE FEDERALIST PARTY 1 35 

ington once exclaimed he would rather be in his grave 
than sit and listen to them. Never, perhaps, did 
Washington's strength of character seem more colos- 
sal than in the steadiness with which he pursued his 
course amid that wild confusion. 

The first outburst of popular wrath was against 
Great Britain on the occasion of the Jay treaty in 
1 794. The treaty was called a base surrender to the 
British, and Hamilton was stoned while attempting to 
defend it in a public meeting in New York. Wash- 
ington's personal authority, more than anything else, 
carried the treaty and averted war with Great Britain. 
At that moment the Republican opposition was at its 
height, and scurrilous newspapers heaped anathemas 
upon Washington, calling him the " stepfather of his 
country." But as the Jay treaty enraged the French 
and made them more abusive than ever, the zeal of the 
Republican sympathizers began to cool rapidly. When 
in 1 798 it appeared that Prince Talleyrand was trying 
to extort blackmail from the United States, popular 
wrath in America was turned against France, the war 
cry was raised, " Millions for defence, not one cent for 
tribute," the Republicans were struck dumb, and the 
Federalists seemed to be riding on the top of the tide. 
In a moment of over-confidence the latter now 
ventured upon a step which soon led to their down- 
fall. In their eagerness to keep out intriguing foreign- 
ers and curb the license of the newspapers, they carried 
through Congress the famous alien and sedition laws. 
Through Hamilton's influence these acts were some- 
what softened in passing, but as passed they were 
palpably in violation of the Constitution, and infringed 
so outrageously upon freedom of speech and of the 



136 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

press as to seem to justify all that had been said by 
Republicans as to the dangerous aims and tendencies 
of the Federalist party. 

/ During the two years preceding the election of 1800 
the Federalists steadily lost ground, and the very war 
fever which had for a moment so powerfully aided them 
now gave rise to dissensions within their own ranks. 
Between Hamilton and John Adams there had been 
for some time a feeling of jealousy and distrust, not 
based upon any serious difference of policy, but simply 
upon the fact that one party was not large enough to 
hold two men of such aggressive and masterful tem- 
perament. As is apt to be the case with mere personal 
differences, in which no question of principle is 
involved, it was marked by pettiness and silliness on 
both sides. As in those days the electoral tickets did 
not distinguish between the candidates for the presi- 
dency and the vice-presidency, it was possible to have 
such a thing as a tie between the two candidates of the 
same party; it was even possible that through some 
accident or trick the person intended by the party for 
the second place might get more electoral votes than 
his companion and thus be elected over him. In 1796 
the Federalist candidates were John Adams and 
Thomas Pinckney, and the advice given privately by 
Hamilton to his friends was such as would, if not 
thwarted, have made Pinckney President and Adams 
Vice-president. Hamilton's conduct on this occasion 
was certainly wanting in frankness, and when Adams 
discovered it he naturally felt ill used. The relations 
between the two were made more uncomfortable by 
the fact that Hamilton, although now in private life, 
seemed to have more influence with Adams's cabinet 



AND THE FEDERALIST PARTY 1 37 

than Adams himself. In 1798 the President saw a 
chance to retaliate. A provisional army was to be 
raised in view of the expected war with France, and 
Washington accepted the chief command on condition 
that he might choose his principal officers. With this 
understanding he named as his three major-generals 
Hamilton, Cotesworth Pinckney, and Knox. Presi- 
dent Adams tried to reverse this order, on the ground 
that in the revolutionary army Knox's rank was higher 
than Hamilton's. A quarrel ensued which involved 
the whole Federalist party, and was ended only when 
Washington declared that unless his wishes were 
respected he should resign. Before such a stroke as 
this even Adams's obstinacy must give way, and he 
was placed in the humiliating attitude of a man 
who has not only tried to do a mean thing, but has 
failed. 

If John Adams, however, could be weak, he could 
also be very strong, and his course during the year 
1799 was nothing less than heroic. France was so far 
affected by the warlike preparations of the United 
States as to begin taking informal steps toward a 
reconciliation, and Adams, who knew that war ought 
if possible to be avoided, resolved to meet her half- 
way. In spite of the protests of leading Federalists, 
including part of his own cabinet, he sent envoys to 
France, who in the following year succeeded in making 
a treaty with Napoleon as First Consul. In taking 
this step Adams knew that he was breaking up his 
own party on the eve of a presidential election ; he 
knew that he was thus in all probability ruining his 
own chances for that second term which he desired 
most intensely ; but he acted with a single eye to the 



138 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

welfare of the country, and in all American history it 
would be hard to point to a nobler act. 

The ensuing year, 1800, was one of dire political 
confusion. In the spring election in New York Ham- 
ilton contended unsuccessfully against the wiles of 
Aaron Burr; a Republican legislature was chosen, 
and in the autumn this legislature would of course 
choose Republican electors for President. Political 
passion now so far prevailed with Hamilton as to lead 
him to propose to Governor Jay to call an extra ses- 
sion of the old legislature and give the choice of 
presidential electors to districts. This would divide 
the presidential vote of New York and really defeat 
the will of the people as just expressed. Jay refused 
to lend himself to such a scheme. That Hamilton 
should ever have entertained it shows how far he was 
blinded by the dread of what might follow if Jefferson 
and the Republicans should get control of the national 
government. 

Yet in spite of this dread he took the very rash step 
of writing a pamphlet attacking Adams, and advising 
Federalists to vote for him only as a less dangerous 
candidate than Jefferson. This pamphlet was intended 
only for private circulation, but Burr contrived to get 
hold of it, and its publication helped the Republicans. 

Even with all this dissension among their antago- 
nists, the Republican victory of 1800 was a narrow 
one. Adams obtained sixty-five electoral votes. The 
Republican candidates, Jefferson and Burr, each ob- 
tained seventy-three, and it was left for the House of 
Representatives to decide which of the two should be 
President. Nobody had the slightest doubt that the 
choice of the party was Jefferson, and that Burr was 



AND THE FEDERALIST PARTY 1 39 

intended to be Vice-president, but the situation offered 
an opportunity for intrigue. Many leading Federalists 
were so bent upon defeating their arch-enemy, Jefferson, 
that they were ready to aid in raising Burr above him. 
But political passion could not so far confuse Hamil- 
ton's sense of right and wrong as to lead him to inflict 
such a calamity upon the country. His great influence 
prevented the wicked and dangerous scheme on the part 
of the Federalists, and Jefferson became President. 

In a most tragic and painful way the shadow of 
the duel was now thrown across Hamilton's career. 
His eldest son, Philip, aged eighteen, a noble and high- 
spirited boy, of most brilliant promise, had just been 
graduated at Columbia. In the summer of 1801 this 
young man was bitterly incensed at some foul asper- 
sions on his father which were let fall in a public 
speech by a political enemy. Meeting this unscrupu- 
lous speaker some few evenings afterward in a box at 
the theatre, high words ensued, and a challenge was 
given. The duel took place on the ledge below Wee- 
hawken Heights, which was then the customary place for 
such affairs. Young Hamilton fell mortally wounded 
at the first fire, and was carried home to die. As 
one reads of the agonized father, on hearing the first 
alarming tidings, running to summon the doctor and 
fainting on the way, it comes home to one's heart to- 
day with a sense of personal affliction. The student 
of history becomes inured to scenes of woe, but it is 
hard to be reconciled to such things as the shocking 
death of this noble boy. 

It was to be the father's turn next. The unprinci- 
pled intrigues of Burr with the Federalists had ruined 
his chances of advancement in the Republican party. 



HO ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

His only hope seemed to lie in further intrigues with 
the Federalists. The wonderful success of Jefferson's 
administration was winning fresh supporters daily from 
the opposite ranks, and the Federalist minority was 
fast becoming factious and unscrupulous. It was be- 
lieved by some that Timothy Pickering and others in 
New England were meditating secession from the 
Union and the establishment of a Northern confed- 
eracy, to which New York, and perhaps New Jersey 
and Pennsylvania, might be added. Burr was a vain 
and shallow dreamer. As governor of New York he 
might rise to be president of a Northern confederacy. 
At any rate it was worth while to be governor of New 
York, and Burr, while still Vice-president of the United 
States, became a candidate for that position in 1804. 
Hamilton had earned the gratitude of his fellow- 
countrymen by thwarting Burr's schemes in 1801. 
He now thwarted them again. Burr failed of election 
and vowed revenge. His political prospects were 
already well-nigh ruined ; to a wretch like him there 
was some satisfaction in killing the man who had 
stood in his way. The affair was cool and deliberate. 
He practised firing at a target, while in a crafty cor- 
respondence he wound his vile meshes around his 
enemy, and at length confronted him with a challenge. 
Hamilton seems to have accepted it because he felt 
that circumstances might still call for him to play a 
leading part in national affairs, and that to decline a 
challenge might impair his usefulness. The meeting 
took place on the nth of July, 1804, at that ill-fated 
spot under Weehawken Heights. Hamilton fell at the 
first fire, and was carried home, to die the next day. 
The excitement in New York was intense. Vast 



AND THE FEDERALIST PARTY 141 

crowds surrounded the bulletins which told of the 
ebbing of his life, and their sobs and tears were min- 
gled with fierce oaths and threats against the slayer. 
As the news slowly spread through the country, the 
tongue of political enmity was silenced, and the mourn- 
ing was like that called forth in after years by the mur- 
der of Abraham Lincoln. It has been thought that the 
deep and lasting impression produced by this affair 
had much to do with the discredit into which the 
practice of duelling speedily fell throughout the 
Northern states. 

When Alexander Hamilton's life was thus cut 
short, he was only in his eight-and-fortieth year. 
Could he have attained such a great age as his rival, 
John Adams, he might have witnessed the Mexican 
War and the Wilmot Proviso. Without reaching 
extreme old age he might have listened to Webster's 
reply to Hayne, and felt his heart warm at Jackson's 
autocratic and decisive announcement that the fed- 
eral Union must be preserved. One may wonder 
what his political course would have been had he 
lived longer; but it seems clear that he would soon 
have parted company with the Federalists. He had 
already taken the initial step in breaking with them 
by approving Jefferson's purchase of Louisiana. The 
narrow sectional policy of Pickering and the New 
England Federalists was already distasteful to him. 
As the Republican party became more and more 
national, he would have found himself inclining 
toward it as John Adams did, and perhaps might even 
have come, like Adams in later years, to recognize the 
merits and virtues of the great man whose name had 
once seemed to him to typify anarchy and misrule, — 



142 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

Thomas Jefferson. Such mellowing influence does 
wide and long experience of life sometimes have, 
when one can witness great changes in the situation 
of affairs, that we may be sure it would not have been 
without its effect upon Alexander Hamilton. When 
the new division of parties came, after 1825, there can 
hardly be a doubt that he would have found his place 
by the side of Webster and John Quincy Adams. 

At the time of his death he was inclined to gloomy 
views of the political future, for he lacked that serene 
and patient faith in the slow progressiveness of aver- 
age humanity which was the strong point in Jefferson. 
His disposition was to force the human plant and to 
trim and prune it, and when he saw other methods 
winning favour, it made him despondent. He was in 
his last days thinking of abandoning practical politics 
and writing a laborious scientific treatise on the his- 
tory and philosophy of civil government. Such a 
book from the principal author of the " Federalist " 
could hardly have failed to be a great and useful book, 
whatever theories it might have propounded. But 
since we have it not, we may well be content with the 
" Federalist " itself, a literary monument great enough 
for any man and any nation. And as for Hamilton, 
his quick insight, his boldness of initiative, and his 
rare constructive genius have stamped his personality 
so deeply upon American history that, in spite of his 
untimely death, his career has for this and for future 
generations all the interest that belongs to a complete 
and well-rounded tale. 



IV 

THOMAS JEFFERSON 

THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMER 



IV 

THOMAS JEFFERSON 

THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMER 

In the development of English civilization on its 
political side there have been few agencies more 
potent than those represented by the independent 
yeomanry and the country squire. In the history of 
such a country as France, until very recent times, the 
small rural freeholder scarcely plays a part. There 
under the old regime we see the powerful nobleman 
in his grim chateau, surrounded by villages of peas- 
antry holding their property by a servile tenure. The 
nobleman is exempt from taxation, his children are all 
nobles and share in this exemption, so that they con- 
stitute a class quite distinct from the common people 
and having but little sympathy with them. The only 
middle class is to be found in the large walled towns, 
whose burghers have acquired from the sovereign 
sundry privileges and immunities in exchange, per- 
haps, for money furnished to aid him in putting down 
rebellious vassals. Representative assemblies are 
weak and their means of curbing the crown very 
limited, so that early in the seventeenth century they 
fall into disuse ; and as the crown gradually conquers 
its vassals and annexes their domains, the result is at 
length an extremely centralized and oppressive des- 
potism in which the upper classes are supported in 

L 145 



J 46 THOMAS JEFFERSON 

iuxurious idleness by taxes wrung from a groaning 
peasantry. The state of things becomes so bad that 
a radical reform is possible only at the cost of a fright- 
ful paroxysm of anarchy ; and the traditions of per- 
sonal independence are so completely lost that a 
century of earnest struggle has not yet sufficed to 
regain them. As a little American girl observed the 
other day, as the net result of her first impressions of 
Paris, " Every man here has to have some other man 
to see that he does what he ought to do." 

Now in the history of England perhaps the most 
striking of all the many points of contrast with French 
history consists in the position of the rural landholder. 
The greatest proprietor in the country, though almost 
sure to be a peer, does not belong to a different class 
from the common people: his children are not peers, 
and only one of them is likely to become so, except 
perhaps for personal merit. There is no more promis- 
ing career for the younger son than is offered by a 
chance to represent the voters of his county in the 
House of Commons, and thus there has never been 
a sharp division between classes, as there used to be in 
France. Noble families have always paid their full 
share of the taxes. The small tenants have in many 
cases been freeholders, and since the fourteenth cen- 
tury the higher kinds of servile tenures, such as copy- 
hold, have practically ceased to be servile. The higher 
grades of copyholders and the smaller freeholders con- 
stitute that class of yeomanry that has counted for so 
much in history. Of old these small freeholders were 
often known as " franklins," and one of their American 
descendants, winning an immortal name, has illustrated 
the many virtues, the boldness and thrift, the upright- 



THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMER 1 47 

ness and canny tact, which has made them such a 
power in the world. Of somewhat higher dignity than 
the mere freeholder was the " lord of the manor," or 
country squire with tenants under him. He might be 
the son of a peer, or he might be a yeoman who had 
risen in life. This rural middle-class had many points 
of contact on the one hand with the nobility and on 
the other hand with the burghers of the large towns. 
They were all used from time immemorial to carrying 
on public business and settling questions of general 
interest by means of local representative assemblies. 
There was far less antagonism between town and 
country than on the Continent, and when it became 
necessary to curb the sovereign it was comparatively 
easy for the middle class in town and country to join 
hands with part of the nobility for that purpose. 

We can thus understand why the earl and his castle 
have not furnished popular tradition with the themes 
of such blood-curdling legends as have surrounded the 
count and his chateau. The old English yeoman, 
with his yew-tree bow and clothyard shaft, was the 
most independent of mortals, and nothing could exceed 
his pitying contempt of the whole array of armoured 
knights and starveling peasantry that he scattered in 
headlong flight at Poitiers and Navarrete. His lord 
of the manor was not so much the taskmaster of his 
tenants as their leader and representative. A sturdy 
and thrifty race were these old English squires. To- 
day perhaps it was to call out their archers and march 
against the invading Scot ; to-morrow it was to sit in 
Parliament with hats drawn over their knitted brows 
and put into dutiful but ominous phrases some stern 
demand for a redress of wrongs. Age after age of such 



148 THOMAS JEFFERSON 

discipline made them capable managers of affairs, keenly 
alive to the bearings of political questions, and fierce 
sticklers for local rights. There never existed a class 
of men better fitted for laying the foundations of a 
nation in which a broad and liberal democracy should 
be found compatible with ingrained respect for parlia- 
mentary methods and constitutional checks. 

Now it was this middle class of squires and yeo- 
manry that furnished the best part of colonial society 
in Virginia, as it furnished pretty much the whole of 
colonial society in New England. An urban middle 
class of merchants and artisans came in greater num- 
bers to New England than to Virginia, and the South- 
ern colony, besides its negroes, received a very low 
class of population in the indented white servants, who 
seem to have been the progenitors of the modern 
"white trash." But the characteristic society — that 
which has made the histories of New England and of 
Virginia what they are — had the same origin in both 
cases. There was also in both cases a principle of 
selection at work, although not so early in Virginia as 
in New England. As the latter country was chiefly 
settled between 1629 and 1640, the years when 
Charles I. was reigning without a Parliament, so the 
former received the most valuable portion of its settlers 
during the Commonwealth, when the son of that un- 
fortunate monarch was off upon his travels. Men who 
leave their country for conscience' sake are apt to be 
picked men for ability and character, no matter what 
side they may have espoused. Our politics may be 
those of Samuel Adams, but we must admit that the 
Hutchinson type of character is a valuable one to have 
in the community. Of the gallant cavaliers who fought 



THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMER 1 49 

for King Charles there were many who no more ap- 
proved of his crooked methods and despotic aims than 
Hutchinson approved of the Stamp Act. A proper 
combination of circumstances was all that was required 
to bring their children into active alliance with the 
children of the Puritans. Most of the great leaders 
that Virginia gave to the American Revolution were 
descended from men who had drawn sword against 
Oliver Cromwell; and a powerful set of men they were. 
Virginia has always known how to produce great 
leaders. The short-lived Southern Confederacy would 
have been much shorter lived but for Lee, Johnston, 
and Jackson ; and the cause of the Union would have 
fared much harder but for the invincible Thomas. 

Colonial life in Virginia departed less than in New 
England from the contemporary type of rural life in 
the mother country. Agriculture in New England 
throve best with small farms cultivated by their owners, 
and this developed the type of yeomanry, while the 
ecclesiastical organization tended to concentrate the 
population into self-governing village communities. 
Agriculture in Virginia seemed to thrive best with 
great estates cultivated by gangs of labourers, and this 
prevented the growth of villages. The Virginia 
planter occupied a position somewhat like that of the 
English country squire. He had extensive estates to 
superintend and county interests to look after. He 
was surrounded by dependents, mostly slaves indeed, 
and in this aspect the divergence from English custom 
was great and injurious ; still Virginia slavery was of 
a mild type. In his House of Burgesses the planter 
had a parliament, and in the royal governor, represent- 
ing a distant sovereign, there was a source of antago- 



I50 THOMAS JEFFERSON 

nism and distrust requiring him to keep his faculties 
perpetually alert, and to remember all the legal maxims 
by which the liberties of Englishmen had been defended 
since the days of Bracton and Fortescue. 

It was into this community that Thomas Jefferson 
was born on the 13th of April, 1743. His first Ameri- 
can ancestor on the father's side had come to Virginia 
among the very earliest settlers, and was a member 
of the assembly of 1619, the first legislative body of 
Englishmen that ever met on this side of the ocean. 
The Jeffersons belonged to the class of yeomanry. 
Thomas's father was a man of colossal stature and 
strength, which the son inherited. Like Washington, 
he was a land surveyor and familiar with the ways of 
Indians. His farm, on which wheat was cultivated as 
well as tobacco, by about thirty slaves, was situated on 
what was then the western frontier, near the junction 
of the Rivanna River with the James. He was a 
justice of the peace, colonel of the county militia, 
and for some time member of the House of Burgesses. 
He died suddenly in 1757, perhaps from exposure in 
the arduous frontier campaigning of that year. 
/ Thomas's mother was Jane Randolph, daughter of 

' one of the most patrician families in Virginia. From 
her he is said to have inherited his extreme tenderness 
of nature and aversion to strife, as well as his love of 

•y music. From his father he derived a strong taste for 
mathematics and the constructive arts, a punctilious 
accuracy in all matters of business, a hatred of cere- 
mony, and a dislike to have other people wait upon 
him. Thomas, when full grown, was six feet and two 
inches in height, lithe and sinewy, erect and alert, with 
reddish hair and bright hazel eyes. His features were 



THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMER 151 

by no means handsome, but the expression of his face 
was attractive. As a daring horseman, a dead shot 
with a rifle, and a skilful player of the violin, he was 
remarkable even among Virginians. Until he entered 
William and Mary College, at the age of seventeen, 
he had never seen a village of as many as twenty 
houses; but since his ninth year he had pored over 
Latin and Greek, and a box of mathematical instru- 
ments and a table of logarithms were his constant 
companions. In college he worked with furious en- 
ergy, and besides his classical and scientific studies 
he kept up an extensive reading in English, French, 
and Italian. He used to keep a clock in his bedroom, 
and get up and go to work as soon as it was light 
enough to see what time it was. After leaving col- 
lege he studied law under one of the best of teachers, 
George Wythe, and in two of the best of text-books, 
Bracton and Coke. He had a keen appreciation of 
the Toryism of Blackstone, and some suspicion of the 
mistaken standpoint from which that charming writer 
viewed the development of the English constitution, 
as has been shown in our day, with such wealth of 
learning, by Freeman and Stubbs. He also gave 
much attention to Montesquieu and Locke, and the 
Parliamentary debates. In 1767 he began the prac- 
tice of law, and in 1769 was elected to the House of 
Burgesses. In 1772 he was married to the blooming 
widow of Bathurst Skelton. His first notable political 
act was in 1774, on the occasion of the convention 
held in August for choosing delegates to the first 
Continental Congress. Being prevented by illness"^ 
from attending the convention, he drew up a series of 
instructions such as he hoped the convention would 



152 THOMAS JEFFERSON 

give to the delegates. This paper, when read in the 
convention, was so much Hked that it was printed as 
a pamphlet under the title of " A Summary View of 
the Rights of British America." In this paper Jeffer- 
son set forth a doctrine which was very popular with 
the Americans at that time, and deservedly so, because 
it gave expression to the view of their relations with 
Great Britain upon which they had always implicitly 
acted. Jefferson held that " the relation between 
Great Britain and the colonies was exactly the same 
as that of England and Scotland" between 1603 and 
1607, "and the same as her present relations with 
Hanover, having the same executive chief, but no 
other necessary connection." The Americans acknow- 
ledged the headship of the king, but not the authority 
of Parliament, and when that body undertook to legis- 
late for Americans, it was simply a case of " one free 
and independent legislature " presuming " to suspend 
the powers of another, as free and independent as it- 
self." James Otis had said things not unlike this a 
dozen years before, when he argued that the supremacy 
of the colonial assembly in Massachusetts was as indis- 
putable and as sacred as that of the Parliament in 
Great Britain ; and similar arguments had been used 
by Samuel Adams and others. But Jefferson's terse 
way of stating the case had a decided savour of revo- 
lution about it. His pamphlet went through ever so 
many editions in England ; its arguments were incor- 
porated into the resolutions adopted by the Continen- 
tal Congress ; and in the following spring Jefferson 
was himself elected a delegate to that great Revolu- 
tionary body. He was then thirty-two years old, and 
the only delegates younger than himself were John 



THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMER 1 53 

Jay, aged thirty, and Edward Rutledge, aged twenty- 
six. Four days before he took his seat the battle of 
Bunker Hill was fought, and when the news reached 
Philadelphia he was appointed on a committee with 
Dickinson and others for drawing up a manifesto justi- 
fying to the world the course of the Americans. The 
manifesto as published contained only a few words of 
his, but among them were the following : " We mean 
not to dissolve that union which has so long and so 
happily subsisted between us, and which we sincerely 
wish to see restored. Necessity has not yet driven us 
into that desperate measure." Wonderfully eloquent 
was that little word " yet " ! The threat of all that was 
to happen next year was latent in it. The current of 
feeling was moving rapidly just then. Two months 
later Jefferson wrote: "There is not in the British 
empire a man who more cordially loves a union with 
Great Britain than I do. But by the God that made 
me I will cease to exist before I yield to a connection 
on such terms as the British Parliament proposes ; and 
in this I think I speak the sentiments of America." 
Observe the historical accuracy of this wording. It 
was not a question of throwing off a yoke, but of re- 
fusing to yield to a connection on newfangled and 
degrading terms. The American colonies had never 
been under a yoke, but they had maintained a con- 
nection with Great Britain in which their legislative 
independence had until within the last ten years been 
virtually recognized. Now they were asked to sur- 
render that legislative independence and come under 
the yoke of the British Parliament, and this, said 
Jefferson, they would never consent to do. The 
American Revolution was essentially conservative. It 



154 THOMAS JEFFERSON 

was fought not so much to gain new liberties as to 
preserve old ones. It was the British in this case that 
were the innovators, and the Americans that were the 
conservatives. This is the true historical light in 
which to study our Revolution, and so this large- 
minded young student of Bracton and Coke under- 
stood it. Because in later years Jefferson came to be 
the head of a party which sympathized with revolu- 
tionary France, there has come into existence a leg- 
endary view of him as a sort of French doctrinaire 
politician and disciple of Rousseau. Nothing could be 
more grotesquely absurd. Jefferson was broad enough 
to learn lessons from France, but he was no French- 
man in his politics ; and we shall not understand him 
until we see in him simply the earnest but cool-headed 
representative of the rural English freeholders that 
won Magna Charta and overthrew the usurpations of 
the Stuarts. 

It was chiefly in drawing up state papers that Jeffer- 
son excelled in Congress, and herein he played a part 
for the whole country like that which Samuel Adams 
had played in the legislature of Massachusetts in the 
earlier scenes of the Revolution. As an orator Jeffer- 
son never figured at all. With all his remarkable 
strength and vigour his voice was weak and husky, so 
that he found it hard to speak in public. He had 
besides a nervous shrinking from hearing himself talk 
on the spur of the moment about things which he 
knew he could so much better deal with sitting at his 
desk. And then he was utterly wanting in combative- 
ness. However he might evoke contention by his 
writings, its actual presence was something from which 
his deliberate, introspective, and delicately poised 



THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMER 1 55 

nature shrank. He was in no wise lacking in moral 
courage, but his sympathies were so broad and tender 
that he could not breathe freely in an atmosphere of 
strife. 

For such a nature the pen, rather than the tongue, 
is the ready instrument. As a wielder of that weapon 
which is mightier than the sword Jefferson was now 
to win such a place as would have made him immortal, 
even had he done no more. In June, 1776, as Richard 
Henry Lee, who had moved the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, was called home to Virginia by the illness 
of his wife, Jefferson was appointed chairman of the 
committee for drawing up the declaration. The draft 
as made by him, with two or three slight changes 
interlined by Franklin and John Adams, was substan- 
tially adopted by Congress. There were no interpola- 
tions worth mentioning, but there were a few omissions, 
and the most important of these was the passage which 
denounced George III. for upholding the slave-trade. 
The antislavery party in Virginia was quite strong at 
that time. In 1769 the legislature had enacted a law 
prohibiting the further importation of negroes to be sold 
into slavery, but at the king's command the governor 
had vetoed this wholesome act. Jefferson made this 
the occasion of a denunciation of slavery and the slave- 
trade, but inasmuch as New England shipmasters 
combined with South Carolina planters in carrying on 
this " execrable commerce," Congress remembered that 
people who live in glass houses should not begin to 
throw stones, and the clause was struck out. 

Some expressions in the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence are often quoted in illustration of Jefferson's 
Gallicism. It begins with a series of generaliza- 



156 THOMAS JEFFERSON 

tions : " We hold these truths to be self-evident, that 
all men are created equal, that they are endowed by 
their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that 
among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of 
Happiness. That to secure these rights. Governments 
are instituted among men, deriving their just powers 
from the consent of the governed," etc. In these 
sentences we may plainly see the result of French 
teaching. It would be very difficult to find in the files 
of the House of Commons any such abstract announce- 
ments of " self-evident truths." The traditional Eng- 
lish squire would appeal, not to speculation, but to 
precedent. He would defend his rights, not as the 
natural rights of men, but as the chartered and pre- 
scriptive rights of Englishmen. This was because the 
English squire had a goodly body of prescriptive 
rights which were worth defending, but the French 
peasant, who had nothing but prescriptive wrongs, was 
obliged to fall back upon the natural rights of man. 
In attempting to generalize about liberty and govern- 
ment, the French philosophers of that day soon got 
beyond their depth, as was to have been expected. 
Such problems cannot be solved by abstract reason, 
but the attempt to rest the doctrines of civil liberty 
upon a broad theoretical basis was praiseworthy. 
Jefferson was always a philosopher as well as a states- 
man, and he was quite capable of learning from 
Voltaire and Montesquieu, Rousseau and Diderot, who 
were then the most suggestive and stimulating writers 
in the world. It pleased him to give a neat little 
philosophical turn to the beginning of his great docu- 
ment, but after this exordium he goes on to the end 
in the practical tone of the English squire. The king 



THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMER 1 57 

is arraigned at the bar of public opinion as a violator 
of chartered rights, a sovereign who by breaking the 
law has forfeited the allegiance of his American sub- 
jects. There is something very happy in the skill with 
which any explicit mention of Parliament is avoided. 
" He has combined with others to subject us to a 
jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknow- 
ledged by our laws ; giving his assent to their acts of 
pretended legislation," etc. It is only in this way that 
allusion was made to Parliament, and it would have 
been impossible to state with more consummate skill 
the American view of the position based upon solid 
American precedent. In every clause is wrapped up 
a genuine historic pearl. There is not one that 
appears as an inference from the philosophic preamble, 
which indeed might have been omitted without alter- 
ing the practical effect of the document. Nothing 
could more clearly show what a skin-deep affair Jeffer- 
son's Gallicism really was. 

In the summer of 1776 Jefferson was reelected to 
the Continental Congress, but declined to serve. It 
was with him as with many other public men at that 
time. Important changes were going on in the several 
state constitutions, which made the services of the 
ablest men needed at home. In Virginia there was a 
great work to be done, and Jefferson went into it with 
wonderful vigour, ably assisted by his old teacher, 
George Wythe, and by Colonel George Mason and the 
youthful James Madison. It was on the 7th of October, 
1776, that Jefferson again took his seat in the Virginia 
legislature. One week from that day he reported a 
bill abolishing the whole system of entail. That 
ancient abuse was deeply rooted in the affections of 



158 THOMAS JEFFERSON 

many of the old families, but popular feeling must 
have been strongly aroused against it, for Jefferson's 
bill was passed within three weeks. All entailed 
estates at once became estates in fee simple, and could 
be bought and sold or attached for debt like other 
property. It was a sweeping reform and won for 
Jefferson the vindictive hatred of many of the aristo- 
crats, some of whom were cruel enough to point to the 
death of his only son as a divine judgment which he 
had brought down upon himself by his impious disre- 
gard of the sacred rights of family. But the reformer 
did not stop here. He next assailed primogeniture, 
and presently overthrew it. At the same time, as 
chairman of a committee for revising the laws, he 
showed, in one important respect, a wise conservatism. 
Against the advice of his able colleague, Edmund 
Pendleton, he insisted upon retaining the letter of the 
old laws wherever possible, because the precise mean- 
ing of every phrase had been determined by decisions 
of the courts, and to introduce new terminology is 
always to open a fresh source of litigation. With all 
this caution he did very much toward simplifying the 
code. Here again we see, not the a priori French 
iconoclast, but the practical and liberal English squire. 
Other reforms, proposed by Jefferson and ultimately 
carried out, were the limitation of the death penalty to 
the two crimes of murder and treason, and the aboli- 
tion of imprisonment for debt. He tried to introduce 
public schools like those of New England, and to 
have a public library established in Richmond ; but 
the state of society in Virginia was not sufficiently 
advanced in this direction to support him. He was 
an earnest advocate of the abolition of slavery, but he 



THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMER 1 59 

realized that there was no hope of carrying through the 
legislature any measures to that end. He did, how- 
ever, in 1778 bring in a bill prohibiting the further 
importation of slaves into Virginia, and carried it with- 
out serious opposition. 

The relations between Church and State also claimed 
his attention. The Episcopal Church was then estab- 
lished by law in Virginia, and dissenters were taxed to 
support it. Besides there were many heavy penalties 
attached to nonconformity ; a man convicted of heresy 
might be deprived of the custody of his children. 
Jefferson's own views of the relations between govern- 
ment and religion are expressed in the following 
remarkable passage from his " Notes on Virginia." 
Opinion, he says, is something with which govern- 
ment has no business to meddle ; it is quite beyond 
its legitimate province. " It does me no injury for my 
neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It 
neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. ... It 
is error alone which needs the support of government. 
Truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion to coer- 
cion, and whom will you make your inquisitors ? 
Fallible men, governed by bad passions, by private as 
well as public reasons. And why subject it to coer- 
cion.^ Difference of opinion is advantageous to reli- 
gion. The several sects perform the office of censor 
morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable } 
Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since 
the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, 
tortured, fined, imprisoned ; yet we have not advanced 
one inch toward uniformity. Let us reflect that the 
earth is inhabited by thousands of millions of people ; 
that these profess probably a thousand different sys- 



l6o THORfAS JEFFERSON 

terns of religion; that ours is but one of that thousand; 
that if there be but one right, and ours that one, we 
should wish to see the nine hundred and ninety-nine 
wandering sects gathered into the fold of truth. But 
against such a majority we cannot effect this by force. 
Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instru- 
ments. To make way for these, free inquiry must be 
indulged ; and how can we wish others to indulge it, 
while we refuse it ourselves ? " These few pithy sen- 
tences have had no little influence upon American 
history. For half a century they furnished the argu- 
ments for the liberal-minded men who, by dint of per- 
sistent effort, succeeded in finally divorcing Church 
from State in all parts of our Union. For holding 
such views Jefferson was regarded by many people as 
an infidel ; in our time he would be more likely to be 
classed as a liberal Christian. The general sentiment 
of the churches has made remarkable progress toward 
his position, though it would be too much to say that 
it has yet fully reached it. In most matters Jefferson's 
face was set toward the future ; in this he was clearly 
in advance of his age, and it was a notable instance of 
his power over men that after only nine years of 
strenuous debate his views should have become incor- 
porated in the legislation of Virginia. In winning 
the victory he was greatly aided by the disfavour into 
which the Established Church had fallen in that state 
because of the lowered character of its clergy, and the 
extreme Toryism of their politics. The credit for the 
victory, moreover, must be divided between Jefferson 
and Madison, whose assistance, always very valuable, 
was here especially powerful. 

In these years Jefferson's industry was prodigious. 



THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMER l6l 

His work on legislative committees was enough to 
tax the stoutest nerves, yet he found time for his gar- 
dening and his scientific studies, and thanked the Lord 
for the thoroughness of the early training which en- 
abled him to solace himself in the intervals of hard 
work by reading Homer in the original. Such strong 
natures find relaxation and rest in what to ordinary 
mortals is painful drudgery. His Greek and his 
mathematics were a relief to him, and of course he 
worked all the better for them, as well as for his farm- 
ing and his hunting and his violin. His tastes were 
all wholesome, pure, and refining; his motives were 
disinterested and lofty ; and under that sweet, placid 
surface his energy was like a consuming fire. Seldom 
has a man so stamped his personality upon a com- 
munity as Jefferson in these few years upon Virginia, 
and thus indirectly and in manifold ramifications upon 
the federal nation in which Virginia was for nearly 
half a century more to be the leading state. The code 
of Virginia, when he had done with it, might almost 
have been called the Code Jefferson. Pity that his 
influence, reenforced by that of Washington and Madi- 
son, Wythe and Mason, could not then have removed 
her from the list of slave states ! Every Virginian to- 
day must confess that that was a pity. But Jefferson 
did all that it was in human strength to do. To the 
end of his days he mourned over negro slavery, and 
saw in it the rock upon which the ship of state might 
break into pieces and founder. " I tremble for my 
country," said he, " when I think of the negro and 
know that God is just." All the agony that creased 
its furrows upon the brow of Abraham Lincoln was 
foretold in those solemn words. 



1 62 THOMAS JEFFERSON 

The work done by Jefferson in Virginia was to some 
extent imitated in other states, not only in its general 
spirit but often in details. One step in his warfare 
with the old Tory families intrenched about Williams- 
burg was the removal of the state capital to the village 
of Richmond, which he accomplished in spite of bitter 
opposition. For Virginia this turned out to be a wise 
policy, but it is curious to see how generally it was 
imitated, apparently through a dread and a jealousy 
felt by the bucolic democracy toward cities and city 
people. Thus our modern capitals are not New York, 
but Albany; not Philadelphia, but Harrisburg; not 
Milwaukee, but Madison ; not St. Louis, but Jefferson 
City; not New Orleans, but Baton Rouge, and so on 
through the majority of the states. In like manner, 
in 1 786, the Shays party wished to remove the govern- 
ment of Massachusetts from Boston to some inland 
village. 

Another measure which Jefferson introduced in 
Virginia, in 1776, and which has been generally imi- 
tated, was the provision for admitting foreigners to 
citizenship after a residence of two years and a decla- 
ration of intention to live in the state. This policy, 
when first introduced, was unquestionably sound, and 
has contributed powerfully to the rapid growth of the 
United States in population and in wealth. It has 
brought, moreover, to a far greater extent than is 
supposed in much of the current talk upon this sub- 
ject, an excellent class of immigrants containing the 
more energetic and adventuresome elements in the 
middle and lower strata of European society. Circum- 
stances, nevertheless, that could not have been fore- 
seen a century ago have surrounded it with dangers. 



THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMER 163 

Cheapness and ease of travel have gone far toward 
making our country the dumping-ground for a much 
worse class of immigrants from all quarters, so that it 
becomes a serious question whether we can assimilate 
them and teach them American political ideas with 
sufficient rapidity. Jefferson's plan of easy naturaliza- 
tion was admirable in 1 776, but in our time it stands 
in need of amendment and restriction. 

In 1779 Jefferson was chosen governor of Virginia, 
but he declined a renomination in 1781, and returned 
to the legislature. It was while he was governor that 
Lord Cornwallis invaded the state; the legislature, 
which for security had assembled at Charlottesville, 
was broken up in one of Tarleton's raids, and Jefferson 
barely escaped capture in his own house at Monticello. 
His political enemies afterward twitted him with run- 
ning away, but I never heard of any man except Don 
Diego Garcia, enshrined in the inimitable pages of 
Cervantes, who undertook to fight single-handed 
against a whole army. In 1782 Mrs. Jefferson died, 
after having been for some years in very poor health. 
For many weeks after this bereavement Jefferson's 
keen interest in life was quenched. He could do no 
work, but spent his days in wandering through the 
woods absorbed in grief. Of his six children, only two 
daughters lived to grow up, but he had long ago 
brought home the six orphan children of his brother- 
in-law, Dabney Carr, and reared them with tenderest 
care. In his busiest and most anxious times he never 
failed to devote part of his attention, most conscien- 
tiously and methodically, to their education. 

In 1783 he was returned to Congress in time to 
take part in ratifying the treaty of peace. He assisted 



1 64 THOMAS JEFFERSON 

Gouverneur Morris in devising our decimal currency, 
and suggested the dollar as the unit. He handed to 
Congress the deed of Virginia ceding the Northwestern 
Territory to the United States; and he drew up the 
Ordinance of 1 784, in which he endeavoured to intro- 
duce the principle of prohibiting all extension of 
slavery into the national domain, the principle upon 
which the present Republican party was founded just 
seventy years later. If Jefferson could have established 
this principle in 1 784, it would have altered the whole 
course of American history. As it is, much credit 
must be given to his initiative in leading to the result 
which in the Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery 
north of the Ohio River. In May, 1784, Jefferson's 
legislative work, so noble and so fruitful, came to an 
end. He left Congress and was appointed com- 
missioner to aid Franklin and John Adams in negoti- 
ating commercial treaties with European nations. 
He arrived in Paris in August, 1784. In the following 
spring the commission was broken up, Adams was 
appointed minister to Great Britain, Franklin came 
home, and Jefferson was appointed minister to France. 
It has been said that " his first diplomatic move was 
a bon mot, and therefore in France a success. ' You 
replace M. Franklin, I hear,' remarked the Count de 
Vergennes at an interview. ' I succeed him, your Excel- 
lency,' he replied promptly; 'no one can r^/<2^^him.'"^ 
The author of the Declaration of Independence was 
well received in Paris. His book entitled, " Notes on 
Virginia," published about this time, was widely read 
and greatly admired. He soon became a kind of 
oracle for literary men and political theorizers to con- 

^ Rosenthal, " America and France," p. 128. 



THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMER 1 65 

suit. To-day it is M. Demeunier who seeks help in 
preparing his articles on political economy for the 
"- Encyclopedie Methodique'.'' To-morrow it is M. Soules 
who is writing in four volumes a history of the Ameri- 
can war and comes for advice. Counsel on still more 
pressing subjects was soon called for. The four years 
of Jefferson's sojourn in Paris were of surpassing 
interest, for they ended in the outbreak of the great 
Revolution. Jefferson's intimacy with Lafayette 
brought him much into the society of the men with 
whom he most sympathized, the reasonable and mod- 
erate reformers, such as Barnave, Rabant de Saint 
Etienne, Duport, Mounier, and others, who were often 
gathered around his hospitable dinner table. When 
the States General were assembled, he used to go every 
day to Versailles to watch the proceedings. On the 
9th of July, 1789, the British ambassador, the Duke 
of Dorset, wrote to Mr. Pitt that " Mr. Jefferson, the 
American minister at this court, has been a great deal 
consulted by the principal leaders of the Tiers Etat ; 
and I have great reason to think that it was owing to 
his advice that that order called itself HAssemblee 
Nationakr However this may be, there is no doubt 
that his advice was often sought. The most notable 
instance was when the Archbishop of Bordeaux, as 
chairman of a committee of the assembly for sketch- 
ing the plan of a constitution for France, went so far 
as to invite him " to attend and assist at their delibera- 
tions." But Jefferson did not regard such action as 
becoming in a foreign minister, and accordingly he 
declined the invitation. In September, 1789, before 
the furious phase of the Revolution had begun, he 
returned to America. 



1 66 THOMAS JEFFERSON 

The experience of these four years, aided by the 
general soundness of his political philosophy, enabled 
Jefferson to take a much more just view of the French 
Revolution than was taken by Englishmen of nearly 
all parties and by the Federalists in America. In its 
earlier stages the Whigs in England and almost every- 
body in America viewed the French Revolution with 
earnest sympathy ; but when its fierce excesses came 
there was a violent reaction. Every one remembers 
how Burke, in his " Letters on a Regicide Peace," 
quite lost his head and raved. He could think of no 
better name for France than " cannibal castle," and 
wanted the revolutionary party summarily annihilated 
by an unrelenting policy of blood and iron. Such a 
reaction of feeling was natural enough. It seized 
upon the Federalists in America, and led such men as 
Hamilton to entertain absurd fears of the wild orgies 
of spoliation likely to ensue upon the victory of de- 
mocracy in our country. The Federalists' view has 
survived down to our own time. In talking about the 
French Revolution people are apt to think only of 
the guillotine and its innocent victims, the saintlike 
Princess Elizabeth, the sprightly Madame Roland, 
Vergniaud, the brilliant orator, Malesherbes, the 
noble statesman, Lavoisier, the great chemist, Andre 
Chenier, the sweet poet, and so many others. In 
contemplating such sad cases it is too easy to forget 
the ineffable horrors, the pestilent foulness, of the old 
regime that was forever swept away, the enlightened 
and wholesome legislation that began in 1789, and 
the rapid and powerful inoculation of the peoples of 
Europe with ideas that have since borne fruit in a 
restored Hungary, a renovated Germany and Italy, 



THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMER 167 

and increased comfort and happiness everywhere. It 
is too easy to forget that the atrocities of the Reign of 
Terror were the result of a temporary destruction of 
confidence among the members of the community, 
and that for this destruction of confidence the royalist 
emigres, in seeking foreign military aid against their 
own country, were chiefly to blame. There can be no 
doubt that Jefferson, without approving the excesses 
of the Jacobins, understood the purport of events in 
France more correctly and estimated them more fairly 
than most of his American contemporaries. Of course 
this gave his political enemies a chance to call him a 
Jacobin, and has led those people of our own time 
to whom he is little more than a name to suppose 
that he obtained his theory of the government from 
Rousseau ! 

When Jefferson came home, in the autumn of 1789, 
it was with the intention of soon returning to France 
to watch the progress of events ; but when he arrived 
at Monticello, two days before Christmas, he found 
awaiting him an invitation from President Washing- 
ton to the position of Secretary of State, and after some 
hesitation, being strongly urged by Washington and 
Madison, he accepted it. In March, 1790, he took his 
place in the cabinet ; during the preceding year it 
had been temporarily occupied by John Jay, whom 
Washington was about to make chief justice. As the 
most crying need of the new government was revenue, 
the work of organization had been carried on mainly 
by Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury. 

It has often been said that Washington, in choosing 
for the chief places in his cabinet two men so antago- 
nistic to each other as Hamilton and Jefferson, was 



1 68 THOMAS JEFFERSON 

actuated by a desire to represent both parties and 
have a non-partisan government. On all sides Wash- 
ington has been praised for this breadth of view, al- 
though it has sometimes been suggested that it was 
not characterized by his customary sagacity. It seems 
to me that this statement is wanting in historical 
accuracy, as it overlooks the fact that it was during 
Washington's administration, and not before it, that 
the definitive divisions between political parties grew 
up. It is true that Jefferson represented the type of 
opinions likely to prevail among the agricultural so- 
cieties of the Southern states, while Hamilton repre- 
sented the type of opinions likely to prevail among 
the commercial and manufacturing centres in the 
Northern states ; but it is hardly correct to say that 
in 1789 these two men belonged to opposite political 
parties. The earliest division of American parties on 
a national scale began in the autumn of 1787, when 
the federal Constitution was submitted to the peo- 
ple of the thirteen states for their approval. Then 
the friends of the Constitution were known as Fed- 
eralists, and its enemies were called Anti-federalists. 
At that time Hamilton and Madison were foremost 
among the Federalists, while George Clinton and 
Patrick Henry were the foremost Anti-federalists. 
Samuel Adams has sometimes been spoken of as 
an Anti-federalist, but this is utterly and grossly in- 
accurate. Samuel Adams was slow in coming to a 
final decision, but when he made up his mind, it was 
in favour of the Constitution with such amendments 
as to be equivalent to a bill of rights, — such amend- 
ments as the first ten, which were soon afterward 
annexed to that instrument. When he decided in 



THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMER 169 

this way, his vast influence secured the ratification 
of the Constitution in Massachusetts by a very narrow 
majority. But for this attitude of Samuel Adams, 
Massachusetts would probably have rejected the Con- 
stitution, and that would have thrown everything back 
into chaos. During that momentous year, 1 788, Jeffer- 
son was in France. What would have been his atti- 
tude if he had been at home and taken part in the 
Virginia convention.? Unquestionably it would have 
been like that of Samuel Adams, for he says as much 
in his letters. He declared that he was much more a 
Federalist than an Anti-federalist, and the only faults 
he had to find with the Constitution were that it did 
not include a bill of rights, and that it did not pro- 
vide against the indefinite reeligibility of the President, 
and thus prevent the presidency from lapsing into 
something like an elective monarchy. The first of 
those faults was soon corrected by the first ten amend- 
ments, which made a very effective bill of rights ; 
the second was corrected by the precedent set by 
Washington and confirmed by Jefferson himself, in 
refusing to serve as President after two terms. It is 
thus evident that Jefferson, on his return to America, 
was practically a Federalist, as party lines were at 
that moment drawn. 

But during Washington's administration the Fed- 
eralists, led by Hamilton, having been given an inch 
by these state conventions that grudgingly ratified the 
Constitution, were naturally inclined, in the enthusiasm 
of their triumph, to claim an ell. The swiftly and 
radically centralizing measures of Hamilton soon car- 
ried the Federalists onward to a new position, so that 
those who agreed with them in 1789 had come to 



170 THOMAS JEFFERSON 

dissent from them in 1 793. It was thus in Washing- 
ton's first administration that the seeds of all party 
differences hereafter to bear fruit in America were 
sown and sedulously nurtured. All American history 
has since run along the lines marked out by the 
antagonism between Jefferson and Hamilton. Our 
history is sometimes charged with lack of picturesque- 
ness because it does not deal with the belted knight 
and the moated grange. But to one who considers 
the moral import of events, it is hard to see how any- 
thing can be more picturesque than the spectacle of 
these two giant antagonists, contending for political 
measures which were so profoundly to affect the lives 
of millions of human beings yet unborn. Coleridge 
once said, with as fair an approximation to truth as is 
likely to be reached in such sweeping statements, that 
in philosophy all men must be Aristotelians or Pla- 
tonists. So it may be said that in American politics 
all men must be disciples either of Jefferson or of 
Hamilton. But these two statesmen represented prin- 
ciples that go beyond the limits of American history, 
principles that have found their application in the his- 
tory of all countries and will continue to do so. Some- 
times a broad comparison helps our understanding of 
particular cases. Indeed, our understanding of par- 
ticular cases cannot fail to be helped by a broad com- 
parison, if it is correctly made. Suppose, then, we 
compare for a moment the general drift of American 
history with that of British history. We are tolerably 
familiar with the differences between Liberals and 
Tories in the mother country. Let us see if we can 
compare the two great American parties with these, 
and decide which are the Liberals and which the 



THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMER 1 71 

Tones ; and in doing this, let us divest ourselves for 
the moment of any prejudices which we may be in the 
habit of cherishing against either Liberals or Tories. 

In England the chief characteristic of the Tory " 
party has been its support of measures which tend 
to strengthen the crown and the aristocracy, and to 
enlarge and tighten the control exercised by the 
community over its individual members. The chiefs 
characteristic of the Liberal party has been its sup- 
port of measures which tend to weaken the crown 
and the aristocracy, and to diminish and relax the 
control exercised by the community over its individ- 
ual members. In all times and countries there has 
been such a division between parties, and in the 
nature of things it is the only sound and abiding 
principle of division. Ephemeral parties rise and 
fall over special questions of temporary importance, 
but this grand division endureth forever. Where- 
ever there are communities of men, a certain por- 
tion of the community is marked off, in one way 
or another, to exercise authority over the whole 
and perform the various functions of government. 
The question always is how much authority shall 
this governing portion of the community be allowed 
to exercise, to how great an extent shall it be per- 
mitted to interfere with private affairs, to take 
people's money in the shape of taxes, whether direct 
or indirect, and in other ways to curb or restrict 
the freedom of individuals. All people agree that 
government must have some such powers, or else 
human society would be resolved into a chaos in 
which every man's hand would be raised against 
every other man. The political question is as to how 



172 THOMAS JEFFERSON 

much power government shall be permitted to exer- 
cise. Where shall the line be drawn beyond which 
the governing body shall not be allowed to go ? 
This has been the fundamental question among all 
peoples in all lands, and it is the various answers 
to this question that have made all the differences in 
the success or the failure of different phases of civil- 
ization, — all the differences between the American 
citizen and the Asiatic coolie. We might thus take 
any nation that has ever existed for comparison with 
the United States, but we choose to take England, 
because there the will of the people has in all ages 
been able to assert itself. In countries where the 
voice of the people has been for a long time silenced, 
as in France under the old regime and in Russia, 
we naturally find parties coming up, like the Jacobins 
and the Anarchists, who would fain destroy all gov- 
ernment and send us back to savagery ; for in politics 
as well as in physics it may be said that action and 
reaction are equal and in opposite directions. But 
in England, just because the people have always been 
able to find their voice and use it, things have pro- 
ceeded normally, in a quiet and slow development, 
like the unfolding of a flower; and so the differences 
between parties have never assumed a radically ex- 
plosive form, but have taken the shape with which we 
are familiar as the differences between Liberals and 
Tories. 

Now if we compare parties in America with parties 
in England, unquestionably the Jeffersonians corre- 
spond to the Liberals and the Hamiltonians to the 
Tories. It is, on the whole, the former who wish to 
restrict, and the latter who wish to enlarge, the powers 



THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMER 1 73 

of government. But this is an incomplete view of the 
matter. In England, for the last three centuries, politi- 
cal progress has consisted in limiting more and more 
the power of the crown and in admitting a larger and 
larger proportion of the people to a share in the gov- 
ernment, and as the Tories have generally resisted 
these progressive measures, they have come to be 
somewhat discredited in the eyes of Americans. It 
is not my purpose, however, to attach any stigma to 
the followers of Hamilton, to the Federalists of 1800, 
to the Whigs of 1840, or to the Republicans of 1880, 
in comparing them to the Tories. Not only has Tory- 
ism its uses in all ages of English history, but there 
was once a time when it was desirable to strengthen 
the crown, to increase the powers of the central gov- 
ernment, and to subordinate the local governments as 
represented by the great vassals. That was the time 
when the English nationality was in process of forma- 
tion, when the chief desideratum was to get a united 
and orderly England. In the eleventh and twelfth 
centuries it was a good thing to have such masterful 
kings as William the Conqueror, and Henry I., and 
Henry II. Even so late as the fifteenth century there 
was a very good side to the overthrow of the old 
baronage and the tightening of the grip of govern- 
ment under Henry VII. National unity is something 
that no people can afford to dispense with, for the 
alternative is chaos. 

Now during the past hundred years the American 
nationality has been in process of formation, and it 
has been desirable to keep the central government 
strong enough to preserve the Union. That has, in- 
deed, been the paramount necessity, and therefore 



174 THOMAS JEFFERSON 

the Hamiltonian theory of strong government has 
been of great value. We could not have got along 
without it. But it is a theory that needs to be applied 
with care and held in check with a curb rein. Other- 
wise it is sure to end in class legislation and plutoc- 
racy, and the reaction shows itself in labour agitation, 
strikes, and anarchical doctrines among the classes of 
people that feel themselves in some way deprived of 
their fair share in the good things of life. 

In 1 798 the Tory character of Hamiltonian federal- 
ism showed itself with crude frankness in the alien 
and sedition acts. At that time, as an indirect result 
of the feud between Hamilton and Adams, Jefferson 
had become Vice-president under a Federalist Presi- 
dent. His protest against the abominable alien and 
sedition acts was uttered in the famous resolutions of 
Kentucky and Virginia, which seemed to tread danger- 
ously near the confines of nullification. To avoid 
repetition I shall reserve what I have to say about 
these resolutions for my lecture on Madison.^ By 
1800 the lines between the party which could enact 
the alien and sedition laws and the party which could 
approve the Virginia resolutions had become so 
sharply drawn that the presidential canvass was as 
fierce as in i860, or in 1876, or in 1884. Just as a 
good many people believed some years ago that the 
election of Mr. Cleveland meant the assumption of 
the rebel war debt, the undoing of the work of recon- 
struction, the instantaneous overthrow of the tariff, 

^ In this affair both the Hamiltonian and the Jeffersonian parties showed 
their weak sides. Against the excesses of a federalism which had lost 
its temper, the protest of republicanism was so energetic as to savour, for 
the moment, of political disintegration. 



THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMER 1 75 

and all manner of vague horror, so in 1800 the Feder- 
alists believed that the election of Mr. Jefferson meant 
the dissolution of the Union and the importation into 
America of all the monstrous notions of French 
Jacobinism. And just as after the election of 1876 
some good people were so afraid of what Mr. Tilden 
might do that they were ready to sanction the shabby 
trick that kept him out of the place to which he had 
been chosen, so after the election of 1800 there were 
worthy people whose ideas of right and wrong became 
so confused that, rather than see the great and pure 
statesman, Thomas Jefferson, in the White House, they 
were ready to surrender the government to the tender 
mercies of such a scoundrel as Aaron Burr. It is 
wonderful how men lose their heads at such times. 
One would suppose that they were electing, not a con- 
stitutional magistrate, but, shall we say, a Russian 
Czar? No, for not even a czar can go far in working 
changes in government at his own sweet will. They 
seem rather to argue as if a President were like the 
king in a fairy tale, with unlimited capacity for evil. 
New England clergymen entertained a grotesque con- 
ception of Jefferson as a French atheist, and I have 
heard my grandmother tell how old ladies in Connecti- 
cut, at the news of his election, hid their family Bibles 
because it was supposed that his very first ofificial act, 
perhaps even before announcing his cabinet, would be 
to issue a ukase ordering all copies of the sacred 
volume throughout the country to be seized and 
burned. 

When people get into such a state of mind the 
only thing that can cure them is an object lesson. 
Mr. Cleveland's administration, human and fallible, 



-4- 



176 THOMAS JEFFERSON 

but upright and able, has lately furnished us with 
such an object lesson. In the first eight years of this 
century the presence of Mr. Jefferson at the head of 
the government educated the American people in 
a similar way, but far more potently in that especially 
plastic and formative time. As a political leader we 
have hardly seen his equal. He had not the kind 
of lofty pugnacity which enabled Hutchinson to win 
victories in the teeth of popular prejudice and clamour, 
but he had that sympathetic insight into the thoughts 
and wishes of plain common people which Samuel 
Adams had, and for the want of which Hutchinson's 
career, in spite of his great powers and his noble 
character, was ruined. 

A man of such sympathetic insight into the popu- 
lar mind — a faculty in which Hamilton was almost 
as lacking as Hutchinson — was just the man that 
was needed at the head of our government in the 
first decade of the nineteenth century. Jefferson -was 
needed at the helm in 1800 as much as Hamilton 
was needed in 1790. He never could have done the 
work of Hamilton or of Madison. They were men 
of rare constructive genius; he was not. But when 
the first work of construction had been done and the 
government fairly set to work, Jefferson was just the 
man to carry it along quietly and smoothly until its 
success passed into a tradition and was thus assured. 
If he had been the French inconoclast that the 
Federalists supposed him to be, he could not have 
achieved any such results. But his career in the 
presidency, like his earlier career, shows him, not as 
a Danton, but as a Walpole. Instead of the general 
overturning which the Federalists had dreaded, the 



THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMER 1 77 

administration quietly followed the lines which Ham- 
ilton had laid down. In other words, it was in the 
hands of a constitutional magistrate who acquiesced 
in the decision of such questions by the will of the 
people. Moreover, as now wielding the administra- 
tion and feeling the practical merits of Hamilton's 
measures, Jefferson was no longer so ready to con- 
demn them. In the most important act of his presi- 
dency he deserted his strict constructionist theories 
and ventured upon an exercise of power as bold as 
Hamilton's assumption of state debts. Napoleon had 
lately acquired from Spain the vast territory between 
the Mississippi River and the crest of the Rocky 
Mountains ; on the eve of war with England, he knew 
that this territory was an extremely vulnerable spot in 
his empire, and he was very glad to surrender it for 
hard cash. Accordingly President Jefferson bought 
it, and thus at a cost of $15,000,000 more than 
doubled the area of the United States and gave to 
our nation its imperial dimensions. The Constitution 
had not provided for any such startling exercise of 
power. Probably the federal convention had not 
so much as thought of such a thing. What is more, 
this acquisition of territory reopened the question as 
to slavery, which the framers of the Constitution 
thought they had closed by their compromises. By 
and by the question was to arise as to what was to be 
done about slavery in states formed from the Louisi- 
ana territory, — a question to be settled only by civil 
war and the abolition of slavery altogether. In Jeffer- 
son's time no such result was dreamed of. The de- 
sirableness of ousting European influence from the 
mouth of the Mississippi River was very great, and 



178 THOMAS JEFFERSON 

the purchase was so generally approved that Jefferson 
abandoned his half-formed purpose of asking Congress 
to propose a constitutional amendment to justify him. 
Perhaps it was not needed. A quarter of a century 
later Chief Justice Marshall laid down the doctrine 
that "the Constitution conferred absolutely on the 
government of the Union the power of making war 
and of making treaties; consequently that government 
possesses the power of acquiring territory either by 
conquest or by treaty." ^ In the time of Jefferson's 
presidency this would have been called loose construc- 
tion. To the general approval of the Louisiana pur- 
chase there was one exception. In New England 
some people feared that in so huge a nation as this 
portended, their own corner of the country would be 
reduced to insignificance. The uneasiness continued 
until after the second war with England. In 181 1 
Josiah Quincy, afterward president of Harvard, de- 
clared in a fervent speech in the House of Repre- 
sentatives, that if the state of Louisiana, the first 
beyond the great river, should be admitted into the 
Union, it would be high time for the New England 
states to secede and form a separate confederacy. 

With Jefferson's strong faith in the teachableness 
of the great mass of people we naturally associate 
universal suffrage, for his influence went largely in this 
direction. We often hear people say that the experi- 
ment of universal suffrage is a failure, that it simply 

^ Extract from the opinion of Chief Justice John Marshall, p. 542, 
I Peters (Sup. Court U. S.) Rep., The American Ins. Co. et al. v. Carter, 
January term, 1828. The case was argued by Mr. Ogden for appellants, 
Mr. Whipple and Mr. Webster for Carter. This is all that appears in the 
decision touching the power to acquire territory. 



THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMER I 79 

results in the sway of demagogues who marshal at the 
polls their hordes of bribed or petted followers. This 
is no doubt very bad. It is a serious danger against 
which we must provide. But do these objectors ever 
stop to think how much worse it would be if the 
demagogue, instead of marshalling his creatures at 
the polls, were able to stand up and inflame their pas- 
sions with the cry that in this country they have no 
vote, no share in making the laws, that they are kept 
out of their just dues by an upper class of rich men 
who can make the laws.? If your hod-carrier was 
sulking for the want of a vote, he would be ten times 
more dangerous than any so-called friend of labour 
can now make him. As it is, his vote does not teach 
him much, because of his dull mind and narrow experi- 
ence, but after all, it gives him the feeling that he is of 
some account in the world, that his individuality is to 
some extent respected ; and this is unquestionably one 
of the most powerful and conservative safeguards of 
American civilization. In point of fact, our political 
freedom and our social welfare are to-day in infinitely 
greater peril from Pennsylvania's iron-masters and the 
owners of silver mines in Nevada than from all the 
ignorant foreigners that have flocked to us from 
Europe. Our legacy of danger for this generation 
was bequeathed us by Hamilton, not by Jefferson. 

The American people took Jefferson into their 
hearts as they have never taken any other statesman 
until Lincoln in these latter days. His influence en- 
dured in his green old age at Monticello, the favoured 
spot where in the early days, when American inde- 
pendence had hardly been thought of, he used to sit 
under the trees with his brilliant young friend and 



l8o THOMAS JEFFERSON 

brother-in-law, Dabney Carr, and chat and dream over 
theories of government and power over men and the 
ways in which it asserted itself. The first term of his 
presidency was serene, because England and France 
were just at that moment at peace, and we were not 
called upon to take part in their quarrel. As candi- 
date for a second term he simply swept the country. 
There was no one in 1804 who dreaded Jefferson. In 
the election of that year he had 162 electoral votes, 
while his Federalist opponent, Cotesworth Pinckney, 
had only 14. Jefferson's influence had become so 
great because he had absorbed all the strength of his 
adversary. He had not approved of Hamilton's acts, 
but he knew how to adopt them and appropriate 
them, just as Hamilton had adopted and appropriated 
Madison's theory of the Constitution. Here again — 
if I may say it once more — we see, not the French 
iconoclast, but the English squire. 

Jefferson died on the 4th of July, 1826, at Mon- 
ticello, just half a century after the promulgation of 
that Declaration of Independence which he had 
written, and John Adams had most powerfully de- 
fended in the Continental Congress. In the bitter 
political strife between 1795 and 1800 Jefferson and 
Adams had become enemies ; but in later years the 
enmity had subsided as old party strife had subsided. 
Jefferson had carried the day. He had lived long 
enough to see the fruition of his work, to see the 
American people in full sympathy with him, and to 
win back the esteem of the great statesman, John 
Adams, from whom he had been so long divided. Could 
there have been a nobler triumph for this strong 
and sweet nature.? On the 4th of July, 1826, at one 



THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMER l8l 

o'clock midday, he quietly passed away, serene in death 
as in all his life. Three hours before on that same 
day, at his home in Massachusetts, John Adams died, 
and just before the last breath left him the memories 
of the grand old times when Massachusetts and Vir- 
ginia stood together and built up this Union flitted 
across his mind, and he murmured, " Thomas Jeffer- 
son still lives." 



V 

JAMES MADISON 
THE CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMAN 



JAMES MADISON 

THE CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMAN 

In the work of constructing our national govern- 
ment and putting it into operation there were five men 
distinguished above all others. In an especial sense 
they deserve to be called the five founders of the 
American Union. Naming them chronologically, in 
the order of the times at which the influence of each 
was most powerfully felt, they come as follows : George 
Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, 
Thomas Jefferson, and John Marshall. But for Wash- 
ington it is very doubtful if independence would have 
been won, and it is probable that the federal Consti- 
tution would not have been adopted. The fact that 
the experiment of the new government could be tried 
under his guidance made quite enough votes for it to 
turn the scales in its favour. His weight of authority 
was also needed to secure the adoption of Hamilton's 
measures and to prevent the half-formed nation from 
being drawn into the vortex of European war. As for 
Madison, he was the constructive thinker who played 
the foremost part among the men who made the Con- 
stitution, besides contributing powerfully with tongue 
and pen to the arguments which secured its ratifica- 
tion. In this work of advocacy Hamilton reenforced 
and surpassed Madison, and then in the work of prac- 

185 



1 86 JAMES MADISON 

tical construction, of setting the new government into 
operation, Hamilton, with his financial measures, took 
the lead. But the boldness of Hamilton's policy 
alarmed many people. There was a widespread fear 
that the government would develop into some kind 
of a despotism, and this dread seemed presently to be 
justified by the alien and sedition laws. Other people 
were equally afraid of democracy, because in France 
democracy was overturning society and setting up the 
guillotine. There was such a sad want of public con- 
fidence among the American people between 1 790 and 
1800, that an outbreak of civil war at the end of that 
period would not have been at all strange. To create 
the needed confidence, to show the doubters and 
scoffers on the one hand that the new government was 
really a government of the people, by the people, and 
for the people, and on the other hand that such a gov- 
ernment can be as orderly and conservative as any 
other, — this was the noble work of Jefferson, and it 
was in his presidency that the sentiment of loyalty to 
the Union may be said to have taken root in the 
hearts of the people. One thing more was needed, 
and that was a large, coherent body of judicial deci- 
sions establishing the scope and purport of the Con- 
stitution, so as to give adequate powers to the national 
government, while still protecting state rights. It was 
that prince of jurists, John Marshall, who, as chief jus- 
tice of the United States for one-third of a century, 
thus finished the glorious work. 

Of these five great men the names of Madison and 
Marshall are much less often upon people's lips than 
the others'. The work in which they excelled was not 
of a kind that appeals to the popular imagination, and 



THE CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMAN 1 87 

personally they were less picturesque figures than the 
other three. Especially is this true of Madison. 
There are many people who do not realize the impor- 
tance of his career or the greatness of his powers. 
Mr. Goldwin Smith, some time ago, in an article in the 
Nineleentk Century spoke of Madison as a respecta- 
ble gentleman of moderate ability, whose most memo- 
rable act was allowing himself to be bullied and badgered 
into making war against Great Britain contrary to his 
own better judgment. This is very much as if one 
should say of Sir Isaac Newton that he was a corpu- 
lent old gentleman, remembered chiefly for having been 
master of the mint and author of a rather absurd book 
on the prophecies of the Old Testament. Mr. Smith 
evidently did not realize that he was speaking of a 
political philosopher worthy to be ranked with Montes- 
quieu and Locke. 

Some of the reasons for this partial eclipse of 
Madison's reputation will appear as we proceed. At 
present we may call attention to the prevailing tendency 
to associate historic events with some one command- 
ing personality, and to forget all the rest. This is a 
labour-saving process, but it distorts our view of his- 
tory. Hamilton was a much more picturesque person- 
age than Madison, and so there has been an unconscious 
disposition to accredit him with Madison's work as well 
as his own. There are people who know enough about 
some things to write respectable books, and still know 
so little about American history as to suppose that our 
federal Constitution was substantially the work of 
Hamilton. One often sees remarks in print in which 
this gross error is implied, if not asserted. In point 
of fact Hamilton had almost nothing to do with the 



1 88 JAMES MADISON 

actual work of making the Constitution. If you con- 
sult a set of Hamilton's writings, you observe that one 
volume is the " Federalist." That is quite right, but 
it need not make us forget that one-third of the volume 
was written by Madison. The work of Hamilton was 
in itself so great that there is no need for a Hamilton 
legend in which the attributes and achievements of 
other heroes are added to his own. Let us now pass 
in review some points in Madison's career. 

His earliest paternal ancestor in Virginia seems to 
have been John Madison, who in 1653 ^ook out a 
patent for land between the North and York rivers on 
Chesapeake Bay. There was a Captain Isaac Madison 
in Virginia as early as 1623, but his relationship to 
John is matter of doubt. John's grandson, Ambrose 
Madison, married Frances Taylor, one of whose 
brothers, named Zachary, was grandfather of President 
Zachary Taylor. The eldest child of Ambrose and 
Frances was James Madison, who was married in 
1 749 to Nelly Conway, of Port Conway. Their eldest 
child, James, was born at Port Conway on the i6th of 
March, 1751, so that he was eight years younger than 
Jefferson and six years older than Hamilton. He was 
the first of twelve children. His ancestors, as he says 
himself in a note furnished to my old friend Dr. Lyman 
Draper in 1834, "were not among the most wealthy 
of the country, but in independent and comfortable 
circumstances." Their position and training were 
those of the well-educated and liberal country squire. 
James's education was begun at an excellent school 
kept by a Scotchman named Donald Robertson, and 
his studies preparatory for college were completed at 
home under the care of the clergyman of the parish. 



* 



THE CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMAN 1 89 

His father was colonel of the county militia, like 
Jefferson's father in the next county, and James could 
always remember the misery which followed upon 
Braddock's defeat, though he was only four years old 
at the time. His intimacy with Thomas Jefferson 
began at an early age, and led to a beautiful friendship 
which lasted through life. There was probably no 
other man for whom Jefferson felt such profound 
respect as for Madison, and the feeling was fully recip- 
rocated. There were many points of resemblance 
between the two, such as the sweetness and purity of 
nature, the benevolence, the liberality of mind, the 
tireless industry, the intense thirst for knowledge ; 
but nothing could have been more striking than the 
contrast in outward appearance between the colossal, 
athletic Jefferson, rosy and fresh as a boy until late in 
life, and the prim, little, weazen Madison, looking old 
before he was grown up. The excessive mental labour 
which the stronger man, aided by his horse and gun, 
could endure with impunity, made the other ill. When 
in college and afterward, Madison had to struggle 
against poor health. He was graduated at Princeton 
in 1772, and remained there another year, devoting 
himself to the study of Hebrew. On returning home 
he occupied himself with history, law, and theology, 
while teaching his brothers and sisters. Of the details 
of his youthful studies little is known, but his industry 
must have been very great ; for in spite of the early 
age at which he became absorbed in the duties of 
public life, the range and solidity of his acquirements 
were extraordinary. For minute and thorough know- 
ledge of ancient and modern history and of con- 
stitutional law, he was quite unequalled among the 



190 JAMES MADISON 

Americans of the Revolutionary period ; only Hamil- 
ton, Ellsworth, and Marshall approached him even at 
a distance. The early maturity of his power was not 
so astonishing as in Hamilton's case, but it was re- 
markable, and, like Washington, he was distinguished 
in youth for soundness of judgment and keenness of 
perception. Along with these admirable qualities, his 
lofty integrity and his warm interest in public affairs 
were well known to the people of Orange County, so 
that when, in the autumn of 1774, it was thought neces- 
sary to appoint a committee of safety, Madison was 
its youngest member. Early in 1776 he was chosen 
a delegate to the state convention, which met at 
Williamsburg in May. The first business of the con- 
vention was to instruct the Virginia delegation in the 
Continental Congress with regard to an immediate 
declaration of independence. Next came the work of 
making a constitution for the state, and Madison was 
one of the special committee appointed to deal with 
this problem. Here one of his first acts was highly 
characteristic. Religious liberty was a matter that 
strongly enlisted his feelings. When it was proposed 
that, under the new constitution, "all men should 
enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion, 
according to the dictates of conscience," Madison 
pointed out that this provision did not go to the root 
of the matter. The free exercise of religion, according 
to the dictates of conscience, is something which every 
man may demand as a right, not something for which 
he must ask as a privilege. To grant to the state the 
power of tolerating is implicitly to grant to it the 
power of prohibiting, whereas Madison would deny to 
it any jurisdiction whatever in the matter of religion. 



THE CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMAN 191 

The clause in the bill of rights, as finally adopted at 
his suggestion, accordingly declares that " all men are 
equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, accord- 
ing to the dictates of conscience." The incident illus- 
trates not only Madison's liberality of spirit, but also 
his precision and forethought in so drawing up an 
instrument as to make it mean all that it was intended 
to mean. In his later career these qualities were 
especially brilliant and useful. 

Madison was elected a member of the first legisla- 
ture under the new state constitution, but he failed 
of reelection because he refused to solicit votes or 
to furnish whiskey for thirsty voters. The new 
legislature then elected him a member of the govern- 
or's council, and in 1780 he was sent as delegate to 
the Continental Congress. The high consideration 
in which he was held showed itself in the number 
of important committees to which he was appointed. 
As chairman of a committee for drawing up instruc- 
tions for John Jay, then minister at the court of 
Madrid, he insisted that in making a treaty with 
Spain our right to the free navigation of the Missis- 
sippi River should on no account be surrendered. 
Mr. Jay was instructed accordingly, but toward the 
end of 1 780 the pressure of the war upon the Southern 
states increased the desire for an alliance with Spain 
to such a point that they seemed ready to purchase 
it at any price. Virginia therefore proposed that the 
surrender of our rights upon the Mississippi should 
be offered to Spain as the condition of an offensive 
and defensive alliance. Such a proposal was no 
doubt ill advised. Since Spain was already, on her 
own account and to the best of her ability, waging 



192 JAMES MADISON 

war upon Great Britain in the West Indies and 
Florida, to say nothing of Gibraltar, it is doubtful 
if she could have done much more for the United 
States, even if we had offered her the whole Missis- 
sippi Valley. The offer of a permanent and invaluable 
right in exchange for a temporary and questionable 
advantage seemed to Mr. Madison very unwise ; 
but as it was then generally held that in such matters 
representatives must be bound by the wishes of their 
constituents, he yielded, though under protest. But 
hardly had the fresh instructions been despatched to 
Mr. Jay when the overthrow of Cornwallis again turned 
the scale, and Spain was informed that, as concerned 
the Mississippi question. Congress was immovable. 
The foresight and sound judgment shown by Mr. Madi- 
^n in this discussion added much to his reputation. 
/ His next prominent action related to the impost 
law proposed in 1783. This was, in some respects, 
the most important question of the day. The chief 
source of the weakness of the United States during 
the Revolutionary War had been the impossibility of 
raising money by means of federal taxation. As long 
as money could be raised only through requisitions 
upon the state governments, and the different states 
could not be brought to agree upon any method of 
enforcing the requisitions, the state governments 
were sure to prove delinquent. Finding it impossible 
to obtain money for carrying on the war, Congress 
had resorted to the issue of large quantities of incon- 
vertible paper, with the natural results. There had 
been a rapid inflation of values, followed by sudden 
bankruptcy and the prostration of national credit. In 
1783 it had become difificult to obtain foreign loans. 



THE CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMAN 1 93 

and at home the government could not raise nearly 
enough money to defray its current expenses. To 
remedy the evil, a tariff of five per cent upon sundry 
imports, with a specific duty upon others, was pro- 
posed in Congress and offered to the several states 
for approval. To weaken as much as possible the 
objections to such a law, its operation was limited 
to twenty-five years. Even in this mild form, how- 
ever, it was impossible to persuade the several states 
to submit to federal taxation. Virginia at first 
assented to the impost law, but afterward revoked 
her action. On this occasion Mr. Madison, feeling 
that the very existence of the nation was at stake, 
refused to be controlled by the action of his constitu- 
ents. He persisted in urging the necessity of such 
an impost law, and eventually had the satisfaction of 
seeing Virginia adopt his view of the matter. 

The discussion of the impost law in Congress re- 
vealed the antagonism between the slave states and 
those states which had emancipated their slaves. In 
endeavouring to apportion the quotas of revenue to 
be required of the several states, it was observed that, 
if taxation were to be distributed according to popu- 
lation, it made a great difference whether slaves were 
to be counted as population or not. If slaves were 
to be counted, the Southern states would have to pay 
more than their equitable share into the federal 
treasury ; if slaves were not to be counted, it was 
argued at the North that they would be paying less 
than their equitable share. Consequently at that 
time the North was inclined to maintain that the 
slaves were population, while the South preferred to 
regard them as chattels. The question was settled 



194 JAMES MADISON 

by a compromise proposed by Mr. Madison : the 
slaves were rated as population, but in such wise 
that five of them were counted as three persons. 

In 1 784 Mr. Madison was again elected to the Vir- 
ginia legislature, an office then scarcely inferior in 
dignity, and superior in influence, to that of delegate 
to the Continental Congress. His efforts were stead- 
fastly devoted to the preparation and advancing of 
measures calculated to increase the strength of the 
federal government. He supported the proposed 
amendment to the Articles of Confederation, giving 
to Congress control over the foreign trade of the 
states ; and pending the adoption of such a measure 
he secured the passage of a port bill restricting the 
entry of foreign ships to certain specified ports. The 
purpose of this was to facilitate the collection of reve- 
nue, but it was partially defeated in its operation by 
successive amendments increasing the number of ports. 
While the weakness of the general government and 
the need for strengthening it were daily growing more 
apparent, the question of religious liberty was the sub- 
ject of earnest discussion in the Virginia legislature. 
An attempt was made to lay a tax upon all the people 
" for the support of teachers of the Christian religion." 
At first Madison was almost the only one to see 
clearly the serious danger lurking in such a tax; that 
it would be likely to erect a State Church and curtail 
men's freedom of belief and worship. Madison's posi- 
tion here well illustrated the remark that intelligent 
persistence is capable of making one person a majority. 
His energetic opposition resulted at first in postpon- 
ing the measure. Then he wrote a " Memorial and 
Remonstrance," setting forth its dangerous charac- 

/ 



THE CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMAN 1 95 

ter with wonderful clearness and cogency. He sent 
this paper all over the state for signatures, and in the 
course of a twelvemonth had so educated the people 
that in the election of 1 785 the question of religious 
freedom was made a test question ; and in the ensuing 
session the dangerous bill was defeated, and in place 
thereof it was enacted " that no man shall be com- 
pelled to frequent or support any religious worship, 
place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, 
restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or 
goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his 
religious opinions or belief ; but that all men shall be 
free to profess, and by argument maintain, their opin- 
ions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in 
no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capaci- 
ties." In thus abolishing religious tests, Virginia came 
to the front among all the American states, as Massa- 
chusetts had come to the front in the abolition of 
negro slavery. Nearly all the states still imposed 
religious tests upon civil office holders, from simply 
declaring a general belief in the infallibleness of the 
Bible, to accepting the doctrine of the Trinity. Madi- 
son's " Religious Freedom Act " was translated into 
French and Italian, and was widely read and com- 
mented upon in Europe. In our own history it set a 
most valuable precedent for other states to follow. 

The attitude of Mr. Madison with regard to paper 
money was also very important. The several states 
had then the power of issuing promissory notes and 
making them a legal tender, and many of them shame- 
fully abused this power. The year 1786 witnessed 
perhaps the most virulent craze for paper money that 
has ever attacked the American people. In Virginia 



196 JAMES MADISON 

the masterly reasoning and the resolute attitude of a 
few great political leaders saved the state from yield- 
ing to the delusion, and among these leaders Madison 
was foremost. But his most important work in the 
Virginia legislature was that which led directly to the 
Annapolis convention, and thus ultimately to the fram- 
ing of the Constitution of the United States. The 
source from which such vast results were to flow was 
the necessity of an agreement between Maryland and 
Virginia with regard to the navigation of the Potomac 
River and the collection of duties at ports on its banks. 
Commissioners, appointed by the two states to discuss 
this question, met early in 1785, and recommended 
that a uniform tariff should be adopted and enforced 
upon both banks. But a further question, also closely 
connected with the navigation of the Potomac, now 
came up for discussion. The tide of westward migra- 
tion had for some time been pouring over the Alle- 
ghanies, and, owing to complications with the Spanish 
power in the Mississippi Valley, there was some dan- 
ger that the United States might not be able to keep 
its hold upon the new settlements. It was necessary 
to strengthen the commercial ties between East and 
West, and to this end the Potomac Company was 
formed for the purpose of improving the navigation 
of the upper waters of the Potomac and connecting 
them by good roads and canals with the upper waters 
of the Ohio at Pittsburg — an enterprise which in 
due course of time resulted in the Chesapeake and 
Ohio Canal. The first president of the Potomac 
Company was George Washington, who well under- 
stood that the undertaking was quite as important in 
its political as in its commercial bearings. At the 



THE CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMAN 1 97 

same time it was proposed to connect the Potomac 
and Delaware rivers with a canal, and a company was 
organized for this purpose. This made it desirable 
that the four states — Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, 
and Pennsylvania — should agree upon the laws for 
regulating interstate traffic through this system of 
waterways. But from this it was but a short step 
to the conclusion that, since the whole commercial 
system of the United States confessedly needed over- 
hauling, it might perhaps be as well for all the thir- 
teen states to hold a convention for considering the 
matter. When such a suggestion was communicated 
from the legislature of Maryland to that of Virginia, 
it afforded Madison the opportunity for which he had 
been eagerly waiting. Some time before he had pre- 
pared a resolution for the appointment of commission- 
ers to confer with commissioners from the other 
states concerning the trade of the country and the 
advisableness of intrusting its regulation to the fed- 
eral government. This resolution Madison left to be 
offered to the assembly by some one less conspicu- 
ously identified with Federalist opinions than himself ; 
and it was accordingly presented by John Tyler, 
father of the future President of that name. The 
motion was unfavourably received and was laid upon 
the table ; but when the message came from Maryland 
the matter was reconsidered and the resolution passed. 
Annapolis was selected as the place for the conven- 
tion, which assembled September 11, 1786. Only five 
states — Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jer- 
sey, and New York — were represented at the meeting. 
Maryland, which had first suggested the convention, 
had seen the appointed time arrive without even taking 



198 JAMES MADISON 

the trouble to select commissioners. As the repre- 
sentation was so inadequate, the convention thought 
it best to defer action, and accordingly adjourned after 
adopting an address to the states, which was pre- 
pared by Alexander Hamilton. The address incorpo- 
rated a suggestion from New Jersey, which indefinitely 
enlarged the business to be treated by such a conven- 
tion ; it was to deal not only with the regulation of 
commerce, but with " other important matters." Act- 
ing upon this cautious hint, the address recommended 
the calling of a second convention, to be held at Phila- 
delphia on the second Monday of May, 1787. Mr. 
Madison was one of the commissioners at Annapolis, 
and was very soon appointed a delegate to the new 
convention, along with Washington, Randolph, Mason, 
and others. The avowed purpose of the new con- 
vention was to " devise such provisions as shall appear 
necessary to render the Constitution of the federal 
government adequate to the exigencies of the Union, 
and to report to Congress such an act as, when agreed 
to by them, and confirmed by the legislatures of every 
state, would effectually provide for the same." The 
report of the Annapolis commissioners was brought 
before Congress in October, in the hope that Congress 
would earnestly recommend to the several states the 
course of action therein suggested. At first the objec- 
tions to the plan prevailed in Congress, but the events 
of the winter went far toward persuading men in all 
parts of the country that the only hope of escaping 
anarchy lay in a thorough revision of the imperfect 
scheme of government under which we were then 
living. The paper money craze in so many of the 
states, the violent proceedings in the Rhode Island 



THE CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMAN 199 

legislature, the riots in Vermont and New Hampshire, 
the Shays rebellion in Massachusetts, the dispute with 
Spain about the navigation of the Mississippi, and the 
consequent imminent danger of separation between 
North and South, had all come together; and now the 
last ounce was laid upon the camel's back in the fail- 
ure of the impost amendment. In February, 1787, 
just as Mr. Madison, who had been chosen a delegate 
to Congress, arrived in New York, the legislature of 
that state refused its assent to the amendment, which 
was thus defeated. Thus, only three months before 
the time designated for the meeting of the Philadel- 
phia convention. Congress was decisively informed 
that it would not be allowed to take any effectual 
measures for raising a revenue. This accumulation 
of difficulties made Congress much more ready to 
listen to the weighty arguments of Mr. Madison, and 
presently Congress itself proposed a convention at 
Philadelphia identical with the one recommended by 
the Annapolis commissioners, and thus in its own way 
sanctioned their action. 

The assembling of the convention at Philadelphia 
was an event to which Madison, by persistent energy 
and skill, had contributed more than any other man in 
the country, with the possible exception of Hamilton. 
It was in the convention that Madison did the greatest 
work of his life. Before the convention met he had 
laid before his colleagues of the Virginia delegation 
the outlines of the scheme that was presented to the 
convention as the " Virginia plan." Of the delegates 
Edmund Randolph was then governor of Virginia, 
and it was he that presented the plan and made the 
opening speech in defence of it ; but its chief author 



200 JAMES MADISON 

was Madison. This " Virginia plan " struck directly 
at the root of the evils from which our federal govern- 
ment had suffered under the articles of confederation. 
The weakness of that government had consisted in 
the fact that it operated only upon states, and not upon 
individuals. Only states, not individuals, were repre- 
sented in the Continental Congress, which accordingly 
resembled a European congress rather than an English 
parliament. According to the ideas entertained at 
the time of the Revolution, the legislative assembly of 
each state was its House of Commons ; in one state, 
North Carolina, it was called by that name. Con- 
gresses were extraordinary meetings of delegates held 
on occasions when the several states felt it necessary 
to consult with each other, just as sometimes happens 
in Europe. There was a Congress at Albany in 1754, 
and one at New York in 1765, and one at Philadelphia 
in 1774; the advent of war and revolution had made 
this last one permanent, and it was the only body that 
represented the United States as a whole. Yet the 
delegates were much more like envoys from sovereign 
states than like members of a legislative body. They 
might deliberate and advise, but had no means of en- 
forcing their will upon the several state governments ; 
and hence they could neither raise a revenue nor pre- 
serve order. Now the cure for this difHiculty, devised 
by Madison and first suggested in the " Virginia plan," 
lay in transforming the Congress into a parliament, 
in making it a national legislature elected by the whole 
American people and having the same authority over 
them that each state legislature was wont to exercise 
over the people of its own state. It was really throw- 
ing Congress overboard and creating a parliament 



THE CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMAN 20I 

instead, only it would not do to call it so, because 
Americans at that time were not fond of the name. 
The new House of Representatives could of course 
tax the people because it represented them. For the 
same reason it could make laws, and to enable it to 
enforce them there was to be a federal executive and 
a federal judiciary. To the familiar state governments 
under which people lived Madison thus superadded 
another government, complete in all its branches and 
likewise coming into direct contact with the people. 
And yet this new government was not to override the 
old ones ; state governors are not subordinate to the 
President, or state legislatures to Congress; each is 
sovereign within its own sphere. This was the supreme 
act of creative statesmanship that made our country 
what it is ; transforming it, as the Germans say, from 
a Staatesnbund into a Buiidesstaat, or, as I may trans- 
late these terms, from a Band-of-States into a Banded- 
State. All this seems natural enough now, but the 
men who could thus think out the problem a century 
ago must be ranked as high among constructive states- 
men as Newton among scientific discoverers. It is to 
Madison that we owe this grand and luminous concep- 
tion of the two coexisting and harmonious spheres of 
government, although the Constitution, as actually 
framed, was the result of skilful compromises by which 
the Virginia plan was modified and improved in many 
important points. In its original shape that plan went 
farther toward national consolidation than the Consti- 
tution as adopted. It contemplated a national legisla- 
ture to be composed of two houses, but both the upper 
and the lower house were to represent population in- 
stead of states. Here it encountered fierce opposition 



202 JAMES MADISON 

from the smaller states, under the lead of New Jersey, 
until the matter was settled by the famous Connecticut 
compromise, according to which the upper house was 
to represent states, while the lower house represented 
population. Madison's original scheme, moreover, 
would have allowed the national legislature to set aside 
at discretion such state laws as it might deem uncon- 
stitutional. It may seem strange to find Madison, 
who afterward drafted the Virginia resolutions of 1 798, 
now suggesting and defending a provision so destruc- 
tive of state rights. It shows how strongly he was 
influenced at the time by the desire to put an end to 
the prevailing anarchy. The discussion of this matter 
in the convention, as we read it to-day, brings out in 
a very strong light the excellence of the arrangement 
finally adopted, by which the constitutionality of state 
laws is left to be determined through the decisioQ of 
the federal Supreme Court. 
/ In all the discussions in the federal convention, 
Madison naturally took a leading part. Besides the 
work of cardinal importance which he achieved as 
principal author of the Virginia plan, especial mention 
must be made of the famous compromise that adjusted 
the distribution of representatives between the North- 
ern and the Southern states. We have seen that in 
the Congress of 1 783, when it was a question of taxa- 
tion, the South was inclined to regard slaves as chat- 
tels, while the North preferred to regard them as 
population. Now, when it had come to be a question 
of the apportionment of representation, the case was re- 
versed ; it was the South that wished to count slaves 
as population, while the North insisted that they 
should be classed as chattels. Here Mr. Madison 



THE CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMAN 203 

proposed the same compromise that had succeeded in 
Congress four years before ; and Mr. Rutledge, of 
South CaroHna, who had supported him on the former 
occasion, could hardly do otherwise than come again 
to his side. It was agreed that in counting population, 
whether for direct taxation or for representation in the 
lower house of Congress, five slaves should be reckoned 
as three individuals. In the history of the formation 
of our federal Union, this compromise was of cardinal 
importance. Without it the Union would undoubt- 
edly have gone to pieces at the outset, and it was for 
this reason that the northern Abolitionists, Gouverneur 
Morris and Rufus King, joined with Washington and 
Madison, and with the pro-slavery Pinckneys, in sub- 
scribing to it. Some of the evils resulting from this 
compromise have led historians, writing from the Abo- 
litionist point of view, to condemn it utterly. Nothing 
can be clearer, however, than that, in order to secure 
the adoption of the Constitution, it was absolutely 
necessary to satisfy South Carolina. This was proved 
by the course of events in 1788, when there was a 
strong party in Virginia in favour of a separate con- 
federacy of Southern states. By South Carolina's 
prompt ratification of the Constitution, this scheme 
was completely defeated, and a most formidable ob- 
stacle to the formation of a more perfect union was 
removed. Of all the compromises in American his- 
tory, this of the so-called " three-fifths rule " was prob- 
ably the most important ; until the beginning of the 
Civil War, there was hardly a political movement of 
any consequence that was not affected by it. 

Mr, Madison's services in connection with the 
founding of our federal government were thus, up to 



204 JAMES MADISON 

this point, of the most transcendent kind. We have 
seen that he played a leading part in the difficult work 
of getting a convention to assemble ; the merit of this 
he shares with other eminent men, and notably with 
Washington and Hamilton. Then he was chief author 
of the most fundamental features in the Constitution, 
those which transformed our government from a loose 
and feeble confederacy of states into a strong federal 
nation ; and to him is due the principal credit for the 
compromise that made the adoption of the Constitution 
possible for all the states. After the adjournment of 
the convention his services did not cease. Among 
those whose influence in bringing about the ratifica- 
tion of the Constitution was felt all over the country, 
he shares with Hamilton the foremost place. Accord- 
ing to his own memorandum he was the author of 
twenty-nine of the essays in the " Federalist," while 
fifty-one were written by Hamilton and five by Jay. 
Some of the essays, however, seem to have been writ- 
ten by Madison and Hamilton jointly, and as to others 
there has been more or less dispute. The question is 
not of great importance. Very likely Madison would 
have had a larger share in the work had he not been 
obliged, in March, 1 788, to return to Virginia, in order 
to take part in the state convention for deciding upon 
the ratification of the Constitution. Here the task 
before him, though not so arduous as that of Hamilton 
in the New York convention, was arduous enough. 
Unlike his friend Jefferson, who could hardly speak in 
public, Madison was one of the most formidable par- 
liamentary debaters that ever lived. Without a par- 
ticle of eloquence or of what is called personal 
magnetism, with a dry style and a mild, unimpassioned 



II 



THE CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMAN 205 

delivery, he would nevertheless have been a fair match 
for Charles Fox or the younger Pitt. His vast know- 
ledge was always at command, his ideas were always 
clear and his grasp of the situation perfect, and al- 
though he was so modest that the colour came and 
went upon his cheeks as upon a young girl's, he was 
never flurried or thrown off his guard. He repre- 
sented pure intelligence, which is doubtless one reason 
why his popular fame has not been equal to his merit. 
There is nothing especially picturesque about pure 
intelligence, but it is a great power nevertheless. The 
opposition in Virginia was strong and well organized, 
and had for leaders such eminent patriots as Patrick 
Henry and Richard Henry Lee. The alliance between 
South Carolina and the New England states, which in 
exchange for a prolongation of the foreign slave-trade 
for twenty years gave to Congress the power of regu- 
lating commerce by a simple majority vote, had 
alarmed Virginia. It was feared that it would enable 
the Northern states to enter upon a commercial policy 
in which the interests of Virginia would be disre- 
garded. There was also a party from the Kentucky 
district, which was disgusted at the Northern indiffer- 
ence to the free navigation of the Mississippi River, 
and thought that the interests of all that part of the 
country could best be secured by a separate Southern 
confederacy. As just observed. South Carolina had 
already defeated this dangerous scheme by ratifying 
the Constitution. Nevertheless, when the Virginia 
convention met, the opponents of the Constitution 
were doubtless in the majority. The debates lasted 
nearly a month, and for a considerable part of this 
time the outlook was not promising. The discussion 



206 JAMES MADISON 

was conducted mainly between Madison and Henry, 
the former being chiefly assisted by Randolph, Wythe, 
Marshall, Pendleton, and young Henry Lee; the latter 
by Mason, Monroe, Harrison, and Tyler. To Madi- 
son, more than to any one else, it was due that the 
Constitution was at length ratified, while the narrow- 
ness of the majority — eighty-nine to seventy-nine — 
bore witness to the severity of the contest. It did not 
appear that the people of Virginia were even yet con- 
vinced by the arguments that had prevailed in the con- 
vention. The assembly that met in the following 
October showed a heavy majority of Anti-federalists, and 
under Henry's leadership it called upon Congress for a 
second national convention, to reconsider the work 
done by the first. Senators were now to be chosen 
for the first United States Senate, and Henry, in 
naming Richard Henry Lee and William Grayson, 
both Anti-federalists, as the two men who ought to be 
chosen, took pains to mention James Madison as the 
one man who on no account whatever ought to be 
elected senator. Henry was successful in carrying 
this point. The next thing was to keep Madison out 
of Congress, and Henry's friends sought to accom- 
plish this by means of the device afterward known as 
" gerrymandering " ; but the attempt failed, and Madi- 
son was elected to the first national House of Repre- 
sentatives. His great knowledge, and the part he had 
played in building up the framework of the govern- 
ment, made him from the outset the leading member 
of the House. His first motion was one for raising 
a revenue by tariff and tonnage duties. He offered 
the resolutions for creating the executive departments 
of foreign affairs, of the treasury, and of war. He 



THE CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMAN 207 

proposed twelve amendments to the Constitution, in 
order to meet the objection, urged in many quarters, 
that that instrument did not contain a bill of rights. 
The first ten of these amendments were adopted, and 
became part of the Constitution in 1791. 

The first division of political parties under the Con- 
stitution began to show itself in the debates upon 
Hamilton's financial measures as Secretary of the 
Treasury, and in this division we see Madison acting 
as leader of the opposition. By many writers this 
has been regarded as indicating a radical change of 
attitude on his part, and sundry explanations have 
been offered to account for the presumed inconsist- 
ency. He has been supposed to have succumbed to 
the personal influence of Jefferson, and to have yielded 
his own convictions to the desires and prejudices of 
his constituents. Such explanations are hardly borne 
out by what we know of Madison's career up to this 
point; and, moreover, they are uncalled for. If we 
consider carefully the circumstances of the time, the 
presumed inconsistency in his conduct disappears. 
The new Republican party, of which he soon became 
one of the leaders, was something quite different in its 
attitude from the Anti-federalist party of 1 787-1 790. 
There was ample room in it for men who, in those 
critical years, had been stanch Federalists, and as time 
passed this came to be more and more the case, until, 
after a quarter of a century, the entire Federalist party, 
with the exception of a few inflexible men in New 
England, had been absorbed by the Republican party. 
In 1 790, since the federal Constitution had been actually 
adopted and was going into operation, and since the 
extent of power that it granted to the general govern- 



2o8 JAMES MADISON 

ment must be gradually tested by the discussion of 
specific measures, it followed that the only natural and 
healthful division of parties must be the division be- 
tween strict and loose constructionists. It was to be 
expected that Anti-federalists would become strict con- 
structionists, and so most of them did, though examples 
were not wanting of such men swinging to the oppo- 
site extreme of politics and advocating an extension 
of the powers of the federal government. This was 
the case with Patrick Henry. But there was no 
reason in the world why a Federalist of 1 787-1 790 
must thereafter, in order to preserve his consistency, 
become a loose constructionist. It was entirely con- 
sistent for a statesman to advocate the adoption of the 
Constitution, while convinced that the powers specifi- 
cally granted therein to the general government were 
ample and that great care should be taken not to add 
indefinitely to such powers through rash and loose 
methods of interpretation. Not only is such an atti- 
tude perfectly reasonable in itself, but it is, in particu- 
lar, the one that a principal author of the Constitution 
would have been very likely to take ; and no doubt it 
was just this attitude that Mr. Madison took in the 
early sessions of Congress. The occasions on which 
he assumed it were, moreover, eminently proper, and 
afford an admirable illustration of the difference in 
temper and mental habit between himself and Hamil- 
ton. The latter had always more faith in the heroic 
treatment of political questions than Madison. The 
restoration of American credit in 1790 was a task 
that demanded heroic measures, and it was fortunate 
that we had such a man as Hamilton to undertake it. 
But undoubtedly the assumption of state debts by the 



THE CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMAN 209 

federal government, however admirably it met the 
emergency of the moment, was such a measure as 
might easily create a dangerous precedent, and there 
was certainly nothing strange or inconsistent in Madi- 
son's opposition to it. A similar explanation will 
cover his opposition to Hamilton's national bank; 
and indeed, with the considerations here given as a 
clew, there is little or nothing in Mr. Madison's career 
in Congress that is not thoroughly intelligible. At 
the time, however, the Federalists, disappointed at los- 
ing a man of so much power, misunderstood his acts 
and misrepresented his motives, and the old friendship 
between him and Hamilton gave way to mutual dis- 
trust and dislike. In the political agitation caused 
by the French Revolution, Mr. Madison sympathized 
with the revolutionists, though he did not go so far in 
this direction as Jefferson. In the debates upon Jay's 
treaty with Great Britain, he led the opposition, and 
earnestly supported the resolution asking President 
Washington to submit to the House of Representa- 
tives copies of the papers relating to the negotiation. 
After three weeks of debate the resolution was passed, 
but Washington refused the request on the ground 
that the making of treaties was intrusted by the Con- 
stitution to the President and the Senate, and that the 
lower house was not entitled to meddle with their 
work. 

At the close of Washington's second administration, 
Mr. Madison retired for a brief season from public 
life. During this difficult period the country had 
been fortunate in having, as leader of the opposition 
in Congress, a man so wise in counsel, so temperate in 
spirit, and so courteous in demeanour. Whatever else 



2IO JAMES MADISON 

might be said of Madison's conduct in opposition, it 
could never be called factious ; it was calm, generous, 
and disinterested. About two years before the close 
of his career in Congress, he married Mrs. Dolly 
Payne Todd, a beautiful widow, much younger than 
himself; and about this time he seems to have built 
the house at Montpelier which was to be his home 
during his later years. But retirement from public 
life, in any real sense of the phrase, was not yet possi- 
ble for such a man. The wrath of the French govern- 
ment over Jay's treaty led to depredations upon 
American shipping, to the sending of commissions to 
Paris, and to the blackmailing attempts of Talleyrand, 
as shown up in the X. Y. Z. despatches. In the fierce 
outburst of indignation that in America greeted these 
disclosures, in the sudden desire for war with France, 
which went so far as to vent itself in actual fighting on 
the sea, though war was never declared, the Federalist 
party believed itself to be so strong that it proceeded 
at once to make one of the greatest blunders ever 
made by a political party, in passing the alien and sedi- 
tion acts. This high-handed legislation caused a sud- 
den revulsion of feeling in favour of the Republicans, 
and called forth vigorous remonstrance. Party feeling 
has perhaps never in this country been so bitter, ex- 
cept just before the Civil War. A series of resolutions, 
drawn up by Madison, was adopted in 1798 by the 
legislature of Virginia ; while a similar series, still 
more pronounced, drawn up by Jefferson, was adopted 
in the same year by the legislature of Kentucky. The 
Virginia resolutions asserted with truth that, in adopt- 
ing the federal Constitution, the states had surrendered 
only a limited portion of their powers ; and went on to 



m 



THE CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMAN 211 

declare that, whenever the federal government should 
exceed its constitutional authority, it was the business of 
the state governments to interfere and pronounce such 
action unconstitutional. Accordingly, Virginia de- 
clared the alien and sedition laws unconstitutional, 
and invited the other states to join in the declaration. 
Not meeting with a favourable response, Virginia re- 
newed these resolutions the next year. There was 
nothing necessarily seditious, or tending toward seces- 
sion, in the Virginia resolutions ; but the attitude 
assumed in them was uncalled for on the part of any 
state, inasmuch as there existed, in the federal Supreme 
Court, a tribunal competent to decide upon the consti- 
tutionality of acts of Congress. The Kentucky reso- 
lutions went farther. They declared that our federal 
Constitution was a compact, to which the several 
states were the one party and the federal government 
was the other, and each party must decide for itself as 
to when the compact was infringed, and as to the 
proper remedy to be adopted. When the resolutions 
were repeated, in 1799, a clause was added, which 
went still further and mentioned " nullification " as the 
suitable remedy, and one that any state might employ. 
In the Virginia resolutions there was neither mention 
nor intention of nullification as a remedy. Mr. Madi- 
son lived to witness South Carolina's attempt at nulli- 
fication in 1832, and in a very able paper, written in 
the last year of his life, he conclusively refuted the 
idea that his resolutions of 1798 afforded any justifica- 
tion for such an attempt, and showed that what they 
really contemplated was a protest on the part of all the 
state governments in common. Doubtless such a 
remedy was clumsy and impracticable, and the sugges- 



212 JAMES MADISON 

tion of it does not deserve to be ranked along with 
Mr. Madison's best work in constructive states- 
manship ; but it certainly contained no logical 
basis for what its author unsparingly denounced 
as the " twin heresies " of nullification and seces- 
sion. 

With regard to the Kentucky resolutions the case is 
different. They certainly furnished a method of stat- 
ing the case, as to the relations between the states and 
the federal government, of which Calhoun afterward 
made use in developing his theory of nullification. 
There has been much interesting discussion as to how 
far Jefferson is to be held responsible for this view. 
But this discussion has generally proceeded upon the 
tacit and perhaps unconscious assumption that in 
1798 such an idea as that of nullification was a novel 
heresy, and that in lending countenance to it, even in 
the slightest degree, Jefferson figured as in some sense 
the inventor of a notion which bore fruit in the seces- 
sion movement of 1861 and the great Civil War. A 
dispassionate student of history can have no wish to 
absolve Jefferson or any one else from the proper 
responsibility for his political acts. But the way in 
which this case is usually stated, and still more the 
mood in which it is apt to be stated, is not strictly 
historical. It would be more instructive to bear in 
mind that, in 1798, before Marshall's career as chief 
justice had begun, the functions of the Supreme Court 
and its efficiency in checking usurpations of power 
were as yet mere matter of theory and very imperfectly 
realized by the people ; that the new government was 
as yet an experiment believed by half the people to 
be a very hazardous experiment; that thus far its 



THE CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMAN 213 

administration had been monopolized by one party, 
the measures of which, even when most beneficial, had 
been regarded with widespread distrust and dread ; 
and that this distrust now seemed all at once to be 
justified by the passage of laws that were certainly the 
most atrocious in all our history except the Fugitive 
Slave Law. If under these circumstances there were 
some who believed that a confederacy in which such 
laws might be nullified was preferable to a Union in 
which men might be sent to jail, as under the Stuart 
kings, for expressing their honest opinions in the 
newspapers, we ought not to blame them. Such a 
Union would not have been worth the efforts that it 
cost to frame it. Taught by experience, we can now 
see that the fears expressed or implied in the Ken- 
tucky resolutions were really groundless. But that 
they were so, that the people were relieved of such fears 
and the public confidence restored, so that the Union 
began for the first time to be really loved and cherished 
with a sentiment of loyalty, was due chiefly to Jeffer- 
son's election as President in 1800 and the conservative 
policy which he thereafter pursued. When the gov- 
ernment passed out of the hands of the party which 
had enacted the alien and sedition laws, the dread 
subsided, and the vitality of the Kentucky resolutions 
was suspended until Calhoun revived it thirty years 
later. When that new crisis came, the exigency was 
such that, if Calhoun had not found the letter of 
these resolutions ready to hand, the sentiment never- 
theless existed, out of which he would have made his 
doctrines. 

In 1799 Madison was again elected a member of 
the Virginia legislature, and in 1 801, at Jefferson's 



214 JAMES MADISON 

iurgent desire, he became Secretary of State. In accept- 
ing this appointment, he entered upon a new career, in 
many respects different from that which he had hitherto 
followed. His work as a constructive statesman — 
which was so great as to place him in the foremost 
rank among the men that have built up nations — was 
by this time substantially completed. During the 
next few years the constitutional questions that had 
hitherto occupied him played a part subordinate to 
that played by questions of foreign policy, and in this 
new sphere Mr. Madison was not, by nature or train- 
ing, fitted to exercise such a controlling influence as 
he had formerly brought to bear in the framing of our 
federal government. A^ Secretary of State, he was an 
able lieutenant to Mr. Jefferson, but his genius was 
not that of an executive officer so much as that of a 
lawgiver. He brought his great historical and legal 
learning to bear in a paper entitled " An Examination of 
the British Doctrine which subjects to Capture a Neu- 
tral Trade not Open in the Time of Peace." But the 
troubled period that followed the rupture of the treaty 
of Amiens was not one in which legal arguments, 
however masterly, counted for much in bringing angry 
and insolent combatants to terms. In the gigantic 
struggle between England and Napoleon, the com- 
merce of the United States was ground to pieces as 
between the upper and the nether millstone ; and in 
some respects there is no chapter in American history 
more painful for an American citizen to read. The 
outrageous affair of the Leopard and the Chesapeake 
was but the most flagrant of a series of wrongs 
and insults, against which Jefferson's embargo was 
doubtless an absurd and feeble protest, but perhaps at 



THE CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMAN 215 

the same time pardonable as the only weapon left us 
in that period of national weakness. 

Affairs were drawing slowly toward some kind of 
crisis when, at the expiration of Jefferson's second 
term, Mr. Madison was elected President of the 
United States by 122 electoral votes against 47 for 
Cotesworth Pinckney and 6 for George Clinton, who 
received 113 votes for the vice-presidency, and was 
elected to that office. The opposition of the New 
England states to the embargo had by this time 
brought about its repeal and the substitution for it of 
the act declaring non-intercourse with England and 
France. By this time, many of the most intelligent 
Federalists, including John Quincy Adams, had gone 
over to the Republicans. In 18 10 Congress repealed 
the non-intercourse act, which as a measure of intimi- 
dation had proved ineffectual. Congress now sought 
to use the threat of non-intercourse as a kind of bribe, 
and informed England and France that if either 
nation would repeal its obnoxious edicts, the non-inter- 
course act would be revived against the other. Napo- 
leon took prompt advantage of this, and informed Mr. 
Madison's government that he revoked his Berlin and 
Milan decrees as far as American ships were con- 
cerned; but at the same time he gave secret orders 
by which the decrees were to be practically enforced 
as harshly as ever. The lie served its purpose, and 
Congress revived the non-intercourse act as against 
Great Britain alone. In 181 1 hostilities began on 
sea and land, in the affair of Tippecanoe and of 
the President and Little Belt. The growing desire 
for war was shown in the choice of Henry Clay for 
Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Mr. 



2l6 JAMES MADISON 

Madison was nominated for a second term, on condi- 
tion of adopting the war policy. 

The New England Federalists at once accused him 
here of proving recreant to his own convictions, and 
the charge has since been often reiterated by Federal- 
ist writers. Perhaps it would be more correct to say 
that, as to the question of the advisableness of declar- 
ing war against England, he did not share in the 
decided convictions of Clay and Calhoun on the one 
hand or of the New England leaders on the other. 
His mind was more evenly balanced, and his natural 
inclinations led him to shrink from war so long as any 
other policy was available. As to the entire justice 
of the war, on our side, there could of course be no 
doubt. No one called it in question except a few 
superannuated Federalists in New England. The 
only question was as to whether a war policy was prac- 
ticable at that moment, and on this point, in yielding 
to the arguments of Clay and Calhoun, if Mr. Madi- 
son sacrificed convictions, they were certainly not 
convictions that were deeply rooted. He did not 
approach such questions in the mood of an Andrew 
Jackson, but in the mood of a philosopher, who hesi- 
tates and acts sometimes in a yielding to pressure 
of argument that is akin to weakness. On June i8, 
1812, war was declared, and before the autumn elec- 
tion a series of remarkable naval victories had made 
it popular. Mr. Madison was reelected by 128 elec- 
toral votes, against 89 for De Witt Clinton of New 
York. The one absorbing event, which filled the 
greater part of his second term, was the war with 
Great Britain, which was marked by some brilliant 
victories and some grave disasters, including the cap- 



THE CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMAN 21/ 

ture of Washington by British troops and the flight 
of the government from the national capital. What- 
ever opinion may be held as to the character of the ^ 
war and its results, there is a general agreement that 
its management, on the part of the United States, was 
feeble. Mr. Madison was essentially a man of peace, 
and as the manager of a great war he was conspicu- 
ously out of his element. The history of that war 
plays a great part in the biographies of the military 
and naval heroes that figured in it; it is a cardinal 
event in the career of Andrew Jackson or Isaac 
Hull. In the biography of Madison it is an episode, 
which may be passed over briefly. The greatest part 
of his career was finished before he held the highest 
offices ; his immortal renown will rest chiefly or en- 
tirely upon what he did before the beginning of the 
nineteenth century. 

After the close of his second term, in 1817, Mr. 
Madison retired to his estate at Montpelier, where he 
spent nearly twenty happy years with books and friends. 
This sweet and tranquil old age he had well earned by 
services to his fellow-creatures such as it is given to 
but few men to render. Among intelligent students 
of history, there is no one now who would dispute his 
claim to be ranked beside Washington, Hamilton, Jef- 
ferson, and Marshall in the founding of our nation. 
But his part was peculiar. Of all these great men, 
he was preeminently the modest scholar and the 
profound thinker. There was just one moment at 
which he was the greatest of all, and that was the mo- 
ment when his grand path-breaking idea was presented 
to the federal convention in the shape of the Vir- 
ginia plan. The idea of the twofold government, so 



2l8 JAMES MADISON 

simple now, so abstruse then, was Madison's idea. 
And it was the central idea, the fruitful idea, something 
which every one else would have missed, that we owe 
to this quiet, unassuming, unpicturesque little man, 
— this acute thinker and rare constructive genius, — 
James Madison. 



VI 

ANDREW JACKSON 

FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 



VI 

ANDREW JACKSON 

FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 

In one of the debates on the Oregon question in the 
United States Senate, about five and fifty years ago, 
Senator McDuffie of South Carolina laughed to scorn 
the idea that such a remote country as Oregon could 
ever be of the slightest use to us. Just imagine a state, 
said he, the representatives from which would require the 
whole of the year to get to Washington and back! It 
was because of this short-sightedness, which was shared 
by all our Eastern statesmen, that we consented to 
divide the disputed territory with Great Britain. If 
our government could only then have followed the 
wise and bold advice of the far-sighted Benton, the 
whole of that magnificent country now known as Brit- 
ish Columbia might have been ours, and in all prob- 
ability without a war. 

But if those statesmen who thought the northern 
Pacific coast not worth fighting for seem narrow- 
minded, what shall be said of the views expressed by 
Gouverneur Morris in the convention that framed the 
Constitution of the United States? Morris was not 
only one of the most brilliant men in that wonderful 
convention, but as far as the original thirteen states 
were concerned he was inclined to broad and liberal 
views. But when it came to the imperial domain com- 



2 22 ANDREW JACKSON 

prised between the Alleghany Mountains and the Mis- 
sissippi River, the country which the superb diplomacy 
of Adams and Jay had secured for us in the treaty of 
1 783, that was for Gouverneur Morris nothing but back- 
woods. He wanted to have the Constitution so framed 
that this region should forever be kept subordinate to 
the Atlantic States. It would never do, he said, to 
intrust too much legislative power to illiterate back- 
country people ; it needed the wisdom that is found in 
cities and in polite society to hold them in check and 
prevent them from filling the statute book with absurd 
and dangerous laws. It was gravely to be feared that 
the population of the Mississippi Valley might by and 
by come to exceed that of the Atlantic coast ; and ac- 
cordingly this descendant of New York patroons desired 
that some provision should be made by which in such 
an event the minority might rule. It does not seem 
to have occurred to him that, when the dreaded day 
should arrive, this back-country people would occupy 
a central position and have great cities and polite 
society of their own, with views as much entitled to 
consideration as anybody's. 

These suggestions of Gouverneur Morris were too 
impracticable to meet with much favour in the con- 
vention, but the feeling which prompted them was 
common enough at that time and is not yet quite 
extinct. It is only by slow degrees that the American 
people have outgrown this old aristocratic notion that 
political power ought to be confined to certain groups 
or classes of persons who, for one reason or another, 
are supposed to be best fitted to exercise it. The 
Americans of 1787 were not so very unlike their Brit- 
ish cousins in their way of looking at such matters. 



FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 223 

and this was especially true of the Federalist leaders, 
such as Hamilton, John Adams, Pickering, the Pinck- 
neys, and to some extent even Washington. But for 
the wholesome counter-influence of such men as Jef- 
ferson and Gallatin, the political structure reared in 
1787 would have rested upon too narrow a basis. For 
the thorough development of American democracy, 
however, a second struggle with the wilderness seems 
to have been needed. The pure American spirit first 
came to maturity in the breasts of that rugged popula- 
tion that since the days of Daniel Boone and James 
Robertson had been pouring down the western slope 
of the Alleghanies and making the beginnings of the 
two great commonwealths, Kentucky and Tennessee. 
These were states that from the outset owed no alle- 
giance to a sovereign power beyond the ocean. Their 
affairs were never administered by British officials, 
and from the first moment of their existence as organ- 
ized communities, Great Britain was to them a foreign 
country. The importance of this new development 
for a long time passed unnoticed by the older commu- 
nities on the Atlantic coast, and especially by the New 
England states, which were the most remote from it 
alike in geographical position and in social structure. 
For a long time there was a feeling about the Western 
country and its inhabitants not unlike that to which 
Gouverneur Morris gave expression. There was an 
ignorant superciliousness, such as some Englishmen 
are still found to entertain toward the United States 
as a whole. This feeling has been apt to colour the 
books on American history written by Eastern men. 
With the best of intentions, and without the least sus- 
picion of the narrowness of their views, such writers, 



2 24 ANDREW JACKSON 

while freely admitting the vastness and strength of the 
Western country, and the picturesqueness of its annals, 
have utterly failed to comprehend the importance of 
its share in the political development of the American 
nation. There could be no better illustration of this 
than the crudeness of the opinions current in our liter- 
ature and taught in our text-books concerning the 
career of Andrew Jackson, the first American citizen 
who crossed the Alleghanies to take his seat in the 
White House. 

In studying the life of this great man, we must first 
observe the characteristics of the people among whom 
his earlier years were spent, and of whom he was to 
such a marked degree the representative and leader. 
So much has been said about the great influence of 
New England in determining the character of the 
West that we must be careful not to forget that in 
point of time that influence has been distinctly second- 
ary. It was Virginia, together with the mountain dis- 
tricts of Pennsylvania and the Carolinas, that first 
determined the character of the West. Before the 
overflow of population from New England could 
make much impression upon the Western territory, it 
had a great work to do jn occupying rural New York. 
While people in Connecticut were still speaking of 
Syracuse and Rochester as " out West," the pioneers 
from Virginia and North Carolina had built their log 
cabins on bluffs overlooking the Mississippi. A little 
later this powerful Southern swarm passed on into 
Missouri and Arkansas, and even invaded the North- 
western Territory, where its influence was seen in 
repeated attempts, on the part of the inhabitants of 
the regions since known as Indiana and Illinois, to 



FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 225 

persuade Congress to repeal the antislavery clause of 
the Ordinance of 1787. In this Southern stream of 
westward migration three distinct currents were dis- 
cernible. There were, first, the representatives of old 
Virginia families moving on parallels of latitude across 
Kentucky and into Missouri, as fine a race of men as 
can be found in the world, and always fruitful in able 
and gallant leaders. In the second place, there were 
the poor whites, or descendants of the outlaws and 
indented white servants of the seventeenth century in 
Virginia ; we find them moving across Tennessee into 
southern Missouri and Arkansas, while some of them 
made their way into Indiana and the Egyptian dis- 
trict of Illinois. For the most part these men were 
an unprogressive, thriftless, and turbulent element in 
society. Thirdly, the men who, perhaps more than 
any others, gave to the young West its character were 
the hardy mountaineers of the Alleghany region. If 
one were required to give a recipe for compounding 
the most masterful race of men that can be imagined, 
one could hardly do better than say, " To a very lib- 
eral admixture of Scotch and Scotch-Irish with Ene- 
lish stock, with a considerable infusion of Huguenot, 
add a trace of Swiss and Welsh, and set the whole 
to work for half a century hewing down the forest and 
waging an exterminating warfare with Indians." From 
their forefathers in the highlands of Britain these sturdy 
pioneers inherited an appreciation of the virtues of 
mountain dew, and the westward march of American 
civilization has been at all times heralded by the rude 
temples of that freakish spirit, until the placid German 
has followed in his turn, with the milder rites of Gam- 
brinus. In religion these men were, for the most 

Q 



2 26 ANDREW JACKSON 

part, Puritan. There cannot be a greater error than 
to speak of American Puritanism as pecuHar to New 
England. That which was pecuhar to the New Eng- 
land colonies was not the simple fact of Puritanism, 
but the manner in which that Puritanism dominated 
their social structure and determined their political 
attitude. Their origin dates from the time when the 
Puritan idea was seeking to incarnate itself in a theo- 
cratic form of government. That is what has given 
to New England its distinctive character. As for 
Puritanism, regarded as an affair of temperament, 
belief, and mental habit, it has always been widely 
diffused throughout English-speaking America. There 
was a rather strong infusion of it in Maryland, and a 
very strong one in South Carolina ; and nowhere do 
we find the Puritan spirit, with its virtues and its 
faults, its intensity and its narrowness, more conspicu- 
ously manifested than in those children of English 
dissenters and Scottish covenanters and Huguenot 
refugees that went forth from the Alleghanies to colo- 
nize the Mississippi Valley. Originally their theology 
was Calvinistic, but during the latter part of the eigh- 
teenth century a great wave of Wesleyanism swept 
over this part of the country, and Baptist preachers 
also made many converts. 

Devout religious sentiment, in this pioneer society, 
did not succeed in preventing a great deal of turbu- 
lence ; and herein we find a contrast with early New 
England, which has in later times left its traces far and 
wide upon the habits and manners of different parts 
of the United States. Where the early settler of 
Connecticut or Massachusetts would seek redress for 
an injury by appealing to a court of justice, the early 



FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 227 

settler of Tennessee or Kentucky would be very likely 
to take the law into his own hands. From this have 
come the vendettas, the street fighting, the lynch law, 
so conspicuous in the history of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. I am inclined to think that a chief cause of this 
difference between New England and the Southwest is 
to be found in a difference in the methods by which 
the two regions were settled. Rarely, if ever, in New 
England did individuals or families advance singly 
into the forest to make new homes for themselves. 
The migration was always a migration of organized 
communities. Town budded from town, as in ancient 
Greece ; and the outermost town in the skirts of the 
wilderness carried with it, not only the strict disci- 
pline of church and schoolhouse, but also the whole 
apparatus of courts and judges, jails and constables, 
complete and efficient. This was the peculiar fea- 
ture of the settlement of New England that saved 
it from the turbulence usually characteristic of frontier 
communities. When people can obtain justice, with 
reasonable certainty and promptness, at the hands of 
the law, they are not likely to be tempted to take the 
law into their own hands. The turbulence among 
our Western pioneers was only an ordinary instance 
of what happens on frontiers where for a time the 
bonds that hold together the complicated framework 
of society are somewhat loosened. 

This hardy population, which thrust itself into all 
parts of the West, from the prairies of Illinois to the 
highlands of northern Alabama, was intensely Ameri- 
can and intensely national in its feelings. These 
people differed from the planters of South Carolina or 
Louisiana almost as much as from the merchants and 



228 ANDREW JACKSON 

yeomanry of New England and New York, and when 
by and by the stress of civil war came, they were the 
stout ligament that held the Union together. They 
were, in a certain measure, set free from the excessive 
attachment to a state government which was so liable 
to mislead the dweller in the older communities. The 
governments of the seaboard states were older than 
the federal Union ; but the states west of the Alle- 
ghanies were created by the federal Union, and their 
people felt toward it a strong sense of allegiance. 
It was sufficient in 1861 to keep Missouri and Ken- 
tucky, with portions of Tennessee and Virginia, from 
joining the Southern Confederacy, which was thus 
seriously truncated and lamed at the very start. 

These considerations will help us to understand the 
remarkable career of Andrew Jackson. His personal 
characteristics were in large measure the characteristics 
of the community in which he lived. There was the 
intense Americanism, the contempt for things foreign, 
the love for the Union, the iron tenacity of purpose, 
the promptness in redressing his own grievances, the 
earnest Puritan spirit. Some of these characteristics 
in Jackson, as in his neighbours, came naturally by 
inheritance. Of all the pugnacious and masterful, 
single-minded, conscientious, and obstinate Puritans 
that have ever lived in any country, the first place 
must doubtless be assigned to those Scotchmen and 
Yorkshiremen who went over to Ulster and settled 
there in the reign of James I. Perhaps it was the 
constant knocking against Irish Catholicism that 
hammered them out so hard. A good many of them 
came to America in the course of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, and among these was Andrew Jackson of Car- 



Si 
I 



FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 229 

rickfergus, son of Hugh Jackson, linen-draper. An- 
drew's wife was Elizabeth Hutchinson, and her family- 
were linen-weavers. They came to America in 1765, 
the year of the Stamp Act, and before two years had 
passed Andrew Jackson died, only a few days before 
the birth of his famoi s son. 

The log cabin in which the future President was 
born, on the 15th of March, 1767, was situated within 
a quarter of a mile of the boundary between the two 
Carolinas, and the people of the neighbourhood do not 
seem to have had a clear idea as to which province it 
belonged. In a letter of the 24th of December, 1830, in 
the proclamation addressed to the nullifiers in 1832, 
and again in his will. General Jackson speaks of him- 
self as a native of South Carolina ; but the evidence 
adduced by Parton seems to show that the birthplace 
may have been north of the border. Three weeks 
after the birth of her son, Mrs. Jackson moved to the 
house of her brother-in-law, Mr. Crawford, just over 
the border in South Carolina, near the Waxhaw Creek, 
and there Andrew's early years were passed. His 
education, obtained in an " old-field school," consisted 
of little more than the "three R's," and even in that 
limited sphere his attainments were but scanty. His 
career as a fighter began early. In the spring and 
summer of 1780, after the disastrous surrender of 
Lincoln's army at Charleston, the whole of South 
Carolina was overrun by the British. On the 6th 
of August Jackson was present at Hanging Rock, 
when Sumter surprised and destroyed a British regi- 
ment. Two of his brothers, as well as his mother, 
died from hardships sustained in the war. In after 
years he could remember how he had been carried as 



230 ANDREW JACKSON 

prisoner to Camden and nearly starved there, and how 
a brutal officer had cut him with a sword because he 
refused to clean his boots ; these reminiscences kept 
alive his hatred for the British, and doubtless gave 
unction to the tremendous blow that he dealt them at 
New Orleans. In 1781, left quite alone in the world, 
he was apprenticed for a while to a saddler. At one 
time he is said to have done a little teaching in an 
" old-field school." At the age of eighteen he entered 
the law office of Spruce McCay in Salisbury. While 
there he was said to have been " the most roaring, 
rollicking, game-cocking, horse-racing, card-playing, 
mischievous fellow " that had ever been seen in that 
town. Many and plentiful were the wild-oat crops 
sown at that time ; and in such sort of agriculture 
young Jackson seems to have been more proficient 
than in the study of jurisprudence. But in that 
frontier society a small amount of legal knowledge 
went a good way, and in 1 788 he was appointed public 
prosecutor for the western district of North Carolina, 
the district since erected into the state of Tennessee. 
The emigrant wagon train in which Jackson journeyed 
to Nashville carried news of the ratification of the 
federal Constitution by the requisite two-thirds of the 
states. He seems soon to have found business enough. 
In the April term of 1790, out of 192 cases on the 
dockets of the county court at Nashville, Jackson was 
employed as counsel in 42. In the year 1794, out of 
397 cases he acted as counsel in 228, while at the 
same time he was practising his profession in the 
courts of other counties. The great number of these 
cases is an indication of their trivial character. As a 
general rule they were either actions growing out of 



FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 231 

disputed land claims, or simple cases of assault and 
battery. Court day was a great occasion in that wild 
community, bringing crowds of men into the county 
town to exchange gossip, discuss politics, drink 
whiskey, and break heads. Probably each court day 
produced as many new cases as it settled. Amid such 
a turbulent population the public prosecutor must 
needs be a man of nerve and resource. Jackson 
proved himself quite equal to the task of introducing 
law and order, in so far as it depended on him. " Just 
inform Mr. Jackson," said Governor Blount, when 
sundry malfeasances were reported to him ; " he will be 
sure to do his duty, and the offenders will be punished." 
Besides the lawlessness of the white pioneer popula- 
tion, there was the enmity of the Indians to be reckoned 
with. In the immediate neighbourhood of Nashville 
the Indians murdered on the average one person every 
ten days. From 1788 to 1795 Jackson performed the 
journey of nearly two hundred miles between Nash- 
ville and Jonesboro twenty-two times; and on these 
occasions there were many alarms from Indians which 
sometimes grew into quite a forest campaign. In one 
of these affairs, having nearly lost his life in an adven- 
turous feat, Jackson is said to have made the charac- 
teristic remark, " A miss is as good as a mile ; you see 
how near a man can graze danger." It was this wild 
experience that prepared the way for Jackson's emi- 
nence as an Indian fighter. In the autumn of 1794 
the Cherokees were so thoroughly punished by General 
Robertson's famous Nickajack expedition that hence- 
forth they thought it best to leave the Tennessee 
settlements in peace. With the rapid increase of the 
white population which soon followed, the community 



2 32 ANDREW JACKSON 

became more prosperous and more orderly; and in 
the general prosperity Jackson had an ample share, 
partly through the diligent practice of his profession, 
partly through judicious purchase and sales of land. 

With most men marriage is the most important 
event of life ; in Jackson's career his marriage was 
peculiarly important. Rachel Donelson was a native 
of North Carolina, daughter of Colonel John Donel- 
son, a Virginia surveyor in good circumstances, who 
in 1 780 migrated to the neighbourhood of Nashville in 
a very remarkable boat journey of two thousand miles, 
down the Holston and Tennessee rivers, and up the 
Cumberland. During an expedition to Kentucky 
some time afterward, the blooming Rachel was 
wooed and won by Captain Lewis Robards. She was 
a sprightly girl, the best horsewoman and best dancer 
in that country ; she was, moreover, a person of strong 
character, excellent heart, and most sincere piety ; her 
husband was a young man of tyrannical and unreason- 
ably jealous disposition. In Kentucky they lived with 
Mrs. Robards, the husband's mother; and, as was 
common in a new society where houses were too few 
and far between, there were other boarders in the 
family, — among them Judge Overton of Tennessee 
and a Mr. Stone. Presently Robards made complaints 
against his wife, in which he implicated Stone. He 
was even so abusive that his wife became an object of 
sympathy to the whole neighbourhood, and every one, 
including Captain Robards's own mother, condemned 
his behaviour. He had already quarrelled with his 
wife and sent her home to Nashville before Jackson 
became acquainted with her. Presently there was a 
reconciliation, and Robards came to live in Nashville. 



:ifi 



FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 233 

The next object of his jealousy was Jackson. There 
is superabundant testimony that the conduct of the 
latter was quite above reproach. One of the most 
winsome features in Jackson's character was his sin- 
cere and chivalrous respect for women. He was also 
peculiarly susceptible to the feeling of keen sympathy 
for persons in distress. Robards presently left his 
wife and went to Kentucky, threatening by and by to 
return and make her life miserable. His temper was 
so ugly and his threats so atrocious that Mrs. Robards 
was frightened, and in order to get quite out of his 
way, she made up her mind to visit some friends at 
distant Natchez. In pursuance of this plan, with 
which the whole neighbourhood seems to have con- 
curred, she went down the river in company with the 
venerable Colonel Stark and his family. As the Ind- 
ians were just then on the war-path, Jackson accom- 
panied the party with an armed escort, returning to 
Nashville as soon as he had seen his friends safely 
deposited at Natchez. While these things were going 
on, the proceedings of Captain Robards were charac- 
terized by a sort of Machiavellian astuteness. In 1791 
Kentucky was still a part of Virginia, and according 
to the code of the Old Dominion, if a husband wished 
to obtain a divorce, he must procure an act of the 
legislature empowering him to bring his case before a 
jury, and authorizing a divorce conditionally upon the 
jury's finding the proper verdict. Early in 1791 Rob- 
ards obtained the preliminary act of the legislature 
upon his declaration that his wife had run away with 
Jackson. He then deferred further action for more 
than two years. Meanwhile it was reported and be- 
lieved in the West that a divorce had been granted ; 



234 ANDREW JACKSON 

probably Robards himself helped spread the report 
Acting upon this information, Jackson, whose chival- 
rous interest in Mrs. Robards's misfortunes had ripened 
into sincere affection, went in the summer of 1791 to 
Natchez and married her there, and brought her to 
his home at Nashville. In the autumn of 1793 Cap- 
tain Robards, on the strength of the facts which unde- 
niably existed since the act of the Virginia legislature, 
brought his case into court and obtained the verdict 
completing the divorce. On hearing of this, to his 
intense surprise, in December, Jackson concluded that 
the best method of preventing future cavil was to pro- 
cure a new license and have the marriage ceremony 
performed again ; and this was done in January. Jack- 
son was doubtless to blame for not taking more care 
to ascertain the import of the act of the Virginia legis- 
lature. It was a carelessness peculiarly striking in a 
lawyer. The irregularity of the marriage was indeed 
atoned by forty years of honourable and happy wed- 
lock, ending only with Mrs. Jackson's death in Decem- 
ber, 1828; and no blame was ever attached to the 
parties in Nashville, where all the circumstances 
were well known. But the story, half-understood, 
maliciously warped, and embellished with gratuitous 
fictions, grew into scandal as it was passed about 
among Jackson's personal enemies or political oppo- 
nents; and herein some of the bitterest of his many 
quarrels had their source. His devotion to Mrs. Jack- 
son was intense, and his loaded pistol was always kept 
ready for the rash man who should dare to speak of 
her slightingly. 

In January, 1796, we find Jackson sitting in the 
convention assembled at Knoxville for making a con- 



FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 235 

stitution for Tennessee, and tradition has it that he 
proposed the name of the great crooked river as the 
name for the new state. Among the rules adopted by 
the convention, one is quaintly significant : " He that 
digresseth from the subject to fall on the person of 
any member shall be suppressed by the Speaker." 
The admission of Tennessee to the Union was effected 
in June, 1796, in spite of vehement opposition from 
the Federalists, and in the autumn Jackson was chosen 
as the single representative in Congress. Thus at the 
age of twenty-nine he received substantial proof of 
the high esteem in which he was held by his fellow- 
citizens. When the House had assembled, he heard 
President Washington deliver in person his last mes- 
sage to Congress. His first act as a representative 
was characteristic and prophetic ; he was one of the 
twelve extreme Republicans who voted against the 
adoption of the address to Washington in approval of 
his administration. Jackson's two great objections to 
Washington's government were directed against Jay's 
treaty with Great Britain and Hamilton's national 
bank. His feeling toward the Jay treaty was that of 
a man who could not bear to see anything but blows 
dealt to Great Britain, and it was entirely in harmony 
with the fierce spirit of Americanism growing up 
behind the Alleghanies, which was by and by to drive 
the country into war. When one remembers the 
insolence of the British government in those years, in 
refusing to fulfil treaty obligations and surrender the 
northwestern fortresses, in trying to cut off our trade 
with the West Indies, in impressing our seamen, and 
in neglecting to send a minister to the United States, 
one thoroughly sympathizes with Jackson's feeling. 



236 ANDREW JACKSON 

At the same time it is perfectly clear that Washington 
was right in insisting upon the ratification of the Jay- 
treaty. It did not give us much satisfaction, but at 
that moment, and until our new government should 
have become firmly established, anything was better 
than war. A good commentary on the soundness of 
Washington's conduct was to be found in the fact that 
the British were almost as much disgusted with the 
treaty as we were. When war was at length declared, 
in 181 2, Lord Sheffield said they would now be 
revenged upon the Yankees for the concessions 
extorted by Jay. That it did not turn out so was 
partly due to the valour of the young man who now 
sat chafing at Washington's moderation. Jackson's 
other objection shows that even at that early day he 
felt that banking is not a part of the legitimate busi- 
ness of government. The year 1797 was a season of 
financial depression, and the general paralysis of busi- 
ness was ascribed — perhaps too exclusively — to the 
overissue of notes by the national bank. Jackson's 
antipathy to that institution was nourished by what he 
saw and heard at Philadelphia. Of his other votes in 
this Congress, one was for an appropriation to defray 
the expenses of Sevier's expedition against the Chero- 
kees, which was carried ; three others were eminently 
wise and characteristic of the man : — 

1. For finishing the three frigates then building, 
and destined to such imperishable renown, the Consti- 
tution^ Constellation^ and United States. 

2. Against the further payment of blackmail to 
Algiers. 

3. Against removing " the restriction which con- 



fi 



FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 237 

fined the expenditure of public money to the specific 
objects for which each sum was appropriated." 

Three such votes as that, in one Congress, make a 
noble record. Another vote, foolish in itself, was 
characteristic of a representative from the backwoods. 
It was against the presumed extravagance of appro- 
priating $14,000 to buy furniture for the newly built 
White House. Jackson's course throughout was 
warmly approved by his constituents, and in the fol- 
lowing summer he was chosen to fill a vacancy in the 
federal Senate. Of his conduct as senator little is 
known beyond the remark made by Jefferson in 1824 
to Daniel Webster, that he had often, when presiding 
in the Senate, seen the passionate Jackson get up 
to speak and then choke with rage so that he could 
not utter a word. One need not wonder at this if one 
remembers what was the subject most frequently 
brought up for discussion in the Senate during the 
winter of 1 797-1 798. The outrageous insolence of the 
French Directory was enough to arouse the wrath of 
a far tamer and less patriotic spirit than Jackson's. 
It is almost enough to make one choke with rage now, 
in reading about it after one hundred years. At any 
rate it is enough to make one rejoice that, although 
war was never declared, the gallant Truxton did, pres- 
ently, in two well-fought naval battles, inflict crush- 
ing and galling defeat upon the haughty tricolour. 
Those were the days when the new nation in America 
was deemed so weak that anybody might insult it 
with impunity, and France and England vied with 
each other in bullying and teasing us. Under such 
treatment it was hard to maintain prudence. Wash- 



238 ANDREW JACKSON 

ington seriously risked his popularity by averting a 
quarrel with England in 1794; Adams sacrificed his 
chances for reelection by refusing to go to war with 
France in 1799. The effect of all this must be borne 
in mind if we would appreciate the immense and well- 
earned popularity which Jackson acquired when the 
time had come to strike back. 

In April, 1798, Jackson resigned his seat in the 
Senate, and was appointed judge in the Supreme Court 
of Tennessee. He retained this position for six years, 
but nothing is known of his decisions, as the practice 
of recording decisions began only with his successor, 
Judge Overton. During this period he was much 
harassed by business troubles arising from the decline 
in the value of land consequent upon the financial 
crisis of 1798. At length, in 1804, he resigned his 
judgeship in order to devote his attention exclusively 
to his private affairs. He paid up all his debts and 
engaged extensively both in planting and in trade. 
He was noted for fair and honourable dealing, his 
credit was always excellent, and a note with his name 
on it was considered as good as gold. He had a clear 
head for business, and was never led astray by the 
delusions about paper money by which American 
communities have so often been infested. His planta- 
tion was well managed, and his slaves were always 
kindly and considerately treated. 

But while genial and kind in disposition, he was by 
no means a person with whom it was safe to take 
liberties. In 1795 he fought a duel with Avery, an 
opposing counsel, over some hasty words that had 
passed in the court-room. Next year he quarrelled 
with John Sevier, the famous governor of Tennessee, 



FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 239 

and came near shooting him "at sight." Sevier had 
alluded to the circumstances of his marriage. Ten 
years afterward, for a similar offence, though compli- 
cated with other matters in the course of a long 
quarrel, he fought a duel with Charles Dickinson, a 
young lawyer of Nashville. The circumstances were 
such as to show Jackson's wonderful nerve and rare 
skill in grazing danger. Each man meant to kill the 
other, and Dickinson was called the most unerring: 
marksman in all that country. It is said that on the 
way to the place of meeting, as Dickinson and his 
friends stopped at a tavern for lunch, he amused him- 
self by severing a string with his bullet, and pointing 
to the hanging remnant, said to the landlord as he 
rode away, " If Andrew Jackson comes along this 
road, show him that ! " It was in much more serious 
mood that Jackson, as he made the journey, discussed 
with Overton, his second, the proper course to pursue. 
It was decided that, as Dickinson would surely have 
the advantage in a quick shot, it would be best to let 
him fire first, and then take deliberate aim at him. 
When all had arrived upon the ground, at the given 
signal Dickinson instantly fired. It has been thought 
that his aim may have been slightly misled by Jack- 
son's extreme slenderness and the loose fit of his coat. 
Instead of piercing his heart, the ball broke the rib 
close by and made an ugly wound, which, however, 
no one observed. It was a moment of sore astonish- 
ment for Dickinson when he saw his grim adversary 
still standing before him. Jackson's trigger had 
stopped at half cock, but he skilfully raised it into 
position again, and at his fire Dickinson fell mortally 
wounded. It was not until they had gone more than 



240 ANDREW JACKSON 

a hundred yards away from the spot that Jackson 
opened his coat and disclosed his wound, whereat 
Overton expressed the greatest surprise that, after 
such a hurt, he should have been able to remain stand- 
ing and return his adversary's fire. In Jackson's reply 
there was a touch of hyperbole. " By the Eternal," 
said he, " I would have killed him if he had shot me 
through the brain." The unfortunate Dickinson died 
that night, cursing his fate and unspeakably chagrined 
by the belief that he had not hit his enemy. Perhaps 
it would have consoled him somewhat if he could have 
known that, after nearly forty years and in a ripe old 
age, the death of Andrew Jackson was to be caused 
by the wound received that morning. Such incidents 
are far from pleasant to tell ; indeed, they are revolting 
in the extreme. But perhaps nothing could better 
illustrate the unconquerable spirit that carried Jack- 
son through every kind of vicissitude. 

About this time Jackson was visited by Aaron Burr, 
who was then preparing his mysterious Southwestern 
expedition. Since 1801 Jackson had been commander- 
in-chief of the Tennessee militia, and Burr seems to 
have wished, if possible, to make use of his influence 
in raising troops, but without indicating the purpose 
for which they were wanted. In this he was unsuccess- 
ful. Jackson was not the man to be used as a cat's 
paw, but he seems to have regarded the charge of 
treason afterward brought against Burr as ill-founded. 
At Richmond, while Burr's trial was going on, Jack- 
son made a speech reflecting upon Jefferson, and thus 
made himself obnoxious to Madison, who was then 
Secretary of State. Afterward, in 1808, he declared his 
preference for Monroe over Madison as candidate for 



FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 24 1 

the presidency. He was considered unfriendly to Madi- 
son's administration, but this did not prevent him from 
offering his services, with those of twenty-five hundred 
men, as soon as war was declared against Great Britain 
in 18 1 2. Late in that year, after the disasters in the 
Northwest, it was feared that the British might make 
an attempt upon New Orleans, and Jackson was ordered 
down to Natchez at the head of two thousand men. He 
went in high spirits, promising to plant the American 
eagle upon the ramparts of Mobile, Pensacola, and St. 
Augustine, if so directed. On the 6th of February, as it 
had become evident that the British were not meditat- 
ing a southward expedition, the new Secretary of War 
Armstrong sent word to Jackson to disband his troops. 
This stupid order reached the general at Natchez 
toward the end of March, and inflamed his wrath. 
He took upon himself the responsibility of marching 
his men home in a body, an act in which the govern- 
ment afterward acquiesced, and reimbursed Jackson for 
the expense involved. During this march Jackson 
became the idol of his troops, and his sturdiness won 
him the nickname of " Old Hickory," by which he was 
affectionately known among his friends and followers 
for the rest of his life. 

It was early in September, 181 3, shortly after his 
return to Nashville, that the affray occurred with 
Thomas Benton, growing out of an unusually silly 
duel in which Jackson, with more good nature than 
discretion, had acted as second to the antagonist of 
Benton's brother. The case was one which a few 
calm words of personal explanation might easily have 
adjusted. But the facts got misrepresented, and both 
men lost their tempers before arriving at correct views 



242 ANDREW JACKSON 

of the matter. In a tavern at Nashville Jackson 
undertook to horsewhip Benton, and in the ensuing 
scuffle the latter was pitched downstairs, while Jackson 
got a bullet in the left shoulder which he carried for 
more than twenty years. Jackson and Benton had 
been warm friends. After this affair they did not 
meet again until 1823, when both were in the United 
States Senate. They were both as frank and gener- 
ous as they were impulsive, and soon became fast 
friends again. There is an amusing side to the primi- 
tive Homeric boisterousness of such scenes among 
grown-up men of high station in life. In the early 
part of this century, though quite characteristic of the 
Southwest, it was not confined to that part of the 
country. It was not so many years since two con- 
gressmen, Matthew Lyon of Vermont and Roger 
Griswold of Connecticut, had rolled on the floor of 
the House of Representatives, cuffing and pounding 
each other like angry schoolboys. 

The war with Great Britain was complicated with 
an Indian war which could not in any case have been 
avoided. The westward progress of the white settlers 
toward the Mississippi River was gradually driving 
the red man from his hunting-grounds ; and the cele- 
brated Tecumseh had formed a scheme, quite similar 
to that of Pontiac fifty years earlier, of uniting all the 
tribes between Florida and the Great Lakes in a grand 
attempt to drive back the white men. This scheme 
was partially frustrated in the autumn of 181 1, while 
Tecumseh was preaching his crusade among the Chero- 
kees. Creeks, and Seminoles. During his absence his 
brother, known as the Prophet, attacked General Har- 
rison at Tippecanoe and was overwhelmingly defeated. 



FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 243 

The war with Great Britain renewed Tecumseh's op- 
portunity, and his services to the enemy were extremely 
valuable until his death in the battle of the Thames. 
Tecumseh's principal ally in the South was a half-breed 
Creek chieftain named Weathersford. On the shore 
of Lake Tensaw, in the southern part of what is now 
Alabama, was a stockaded fortress known as Fort 
Mimms ; there many of the settlers had taken refuge. 
On the 30th of August, 181 3, this stronghold was 
surprised by Weathersford at the head of one thousand 
Creek warriors, and more than four hundred men, 
women, and children were most atrociously massacred. 
The news of this dreadful affair aroused the people of 
the Southwest to vengeance ; men and money were 
raised by the state of Tennessee ; and, before he had 
fully recovered from the wound received in the Benton 
affray, Jackson took the field at the head of twenty-five 
hundred men. Now for the first time he had a chance 
to show his wonderful military capacity, his sleepless 
vigilance, untiring patience, and unrivalled talent as a 
leader of men. The difficulties encountered were for- 
midable in the extreme. In that frontier wilderness the 
business of the commissariat was naturally ill managed, 
and the men, who under the most favourable circum- 
stances had little idea of military subordination, were 
part of the time mutinous from hunger. More than 
once Jackson was obliged to use one-half of his army 
to keep the other half from disbanding. In view of 
these difficulties the celerity of his movements and the 
force with which he struck the enemy were truly mar- 
vellous. The Indians were badly defeated at Tallasa- 
hatchee and Talladega. At length, on the 27th of 
March, 18 14, having been reenforced by a regiment 



244 ANDREW JACKSON 

of United States infantry, Jackson struck the decisive 
blow at Tohopeka, otherwise known as the Horseshoe 
Bend of the Tallapoosa River. In this bloody battle 
no quarter was given, and the strength of the Creek 
nation was finally broken. Jackson pursued the rem- 
nant to their place of refuge, called the Holy Ground, 
upon which the medicine men had declared that no 
white man could set foot and live. Such of the Creek 
chieftains as had not fled to Florida now surrendered. 
The American soldiers were ready to kill Weathers- 
ford in revenge for Fort Mimms, but the magnanimous 
Jackson spared his life and treated him so well that 
henceforth he and his people remained on good terms 
with the white men. Among the officers who served 
under Jackson in this remarkable campaign were the 
two picturesque men who in later years played such 
an important part in the history of the Southwest, — 
Samuel Houston and David Crockett. The Creek 
War was one of critical importance. It was the last 
occasion on which the red men could put forth suffi- 
cient power to embarrass the United States govern- 
ment. More than any other single battle, that of 
Tohopeka marks the downfall of Indian power on 
this continent. Its immediate effects upon the war 
with Great Britain were very great. By destroying 
the only hostile power within the Southwestern terri- 
tory, it made it possible to concentrate the military 
force of the border states upon any point, however 
remote, that might be threatened by the British. More 
specifically, it made possible the great victory at New 
Orleans. Throughout the whole of this campaign, in 
which Jackson showed such indomitable energy, he 
was suffering from illness such as would have kept 






FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 245 

any ordinary man groaning in bed, besides that for 
most of the time his left arm had to be supported in 
a sling. His pluck was equalled by his thoroughness. 
Many generals after victory are inclined to relax their 
efforts ; not so Jackson, who followed up every success 
with furious persistence, and whose admirable maxim 
was that in war " until all is done nothing is done." 

On the 31st of May, 18 14, Jackson was made major- 
general in the regular army, and was appointed to 
command the Department of the South. It was then a 
matter of dispute whether Mobile belonged to Spain 
or to the United States. In August Jackson occupied 
the town and made his headquarters there. With the 
consent of Spain the British were using Florida as a 
base of operations, and had established themselves at 
Pensacola. Jackson wrote to Washington for per- 
mission to attack them there, but the government was 
loath to sanction an invasion of Spanish territory 
until the complicity of Spain with our enemy should 
be proved beyond cavil. The letter from Secretary 
Armstrong to this effect did not reach Jackson. The 
capture of Washington by the British prevented his 
receiving orders and left him to act upon his own re- 
sponsibility, a kind of situation from which he was never 
known to flinch. On September 14 the British advanced 
against Mobile, but in their attack upon the outwork, 
Fort Bowyer, they met with a disastrous repulse. They 
retreated to Pensacola, whither Jackson followed them 
with three thousand men. On the 7th of November he 
stormed that town. His next move would have been 
against Fort Barrancas, six miles distant, at the mouth 
of the harbour. 

By capturing this post he would have entrapped the 



246 ANDREW JACKSON 

British fleet and might have compelled it to surrender; 
but the enemy forestalled him by blowing up the fort 
and beating a precipitate retreat. For thus driving 
the British from Florida, a most necessary and useful 
act, Jackson was stupidly and maliciously blamed by 
the Federalist newspapers. After clearing the enemy 
away from this quarter, he found himself free to devote 
all his energies to the task of defending New Orleans; 
and there, after an arduous journey, he arrived on the 
2d of December. The British expedition directed 
against that city was much more formidable than any 
other that we had to encounter during that war ; and, 
moreover, its purpose was much more deadly. In the 
North the British warfare had been directed chiefly 
toward defending Canada and gaining such a foothold 
upon our frontier as might be useful in making terms 
at the end of the war. The burning of Washington 
was an exasperating insult, but its military importance 
was very slight. But the expedition against New 
Orleans was intended to make a permanent conquest 
of the lower Mississippi, and to secure for Great Britain 
in perpetuity the western bank of the river. Napoleon 
had sold us the vast Louisiana territory in order to 
keep Great Britain from seizing it. As part of his 
empire it was a vulnerable spot which the mistress of 
the seas could strike with impunity so far as he was 
concerned. He preferred to put it into the hands of 
a power which was at that time hostile toward Great 
Britain. But the latter power felt quite competent to 
take it away from Napoleon's ally, and as the emperor 
had just been dethroned and sent to Elba, the whole 
strength of England, if needed, could be put forth against 
the United States. The war had now lasted more than 



FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 247 

two years, and in spite of our glorious naval victories, 
the American arms upon land had made but little 
headway as against the British. For constructive 
statesmanship Mr. Madison's abilities were of the high- 
est order, but as President he had shown himself un- 
equal to the task of conducting a war. At the outset 
the Americans had entertained hopes of conquering 
Canada, but we had begun with serious defeats and 
losses, and at length, after several brilliant victories, had 
done little more than to ward off invasion at the two 
gateways of Niagara and Lake Champlain. In New 
England the British had seized and held the wilder- 
ness east of the Penobscot, creating quite a panic 
throughout that part of the country. The leaders of 
the old Federalist party in New England were factious 
and disloyal, and in this very month of December, 18 14, 
there was assembled at Hartford a convention which 
adopted measures looking toward a possible dissolution 
of the Union. The national finances were in a state 
of collapse, and nearly all the banks in the Middle and 
Southern states had suspended specie payments. The 
British government assumed a tone of more than ordi- 
nary arrogance. It was going to demand a high price 
for peace : the eastern half of Maine, at any rate, and 
the Michigan territory, and perhaps yet more of the 
Northwest ; and the Americans must promise not to 
keep any more armed vessels upon the lakes, which 
must have sounded queer to Perry and Macdonough. 
Then, with the western bank of the Mississippi secured. 
Great Britain could hem in the United States, as 
France had once hemmed in the colonies ; Canada and 
Louisiana could be made to join hands again. In 
order to effect all this, it seemed necessary to inflict 



248 ANDREW JACKSON 

upon the Americans one crushing and humiHating de- 
feat, — such a defeat, for instance, as the French had 
lately suffered at Vitoria. That this could be done 
few Englishmen doubted, and so confident was the 
expectation of victory that governors and comman- 
dants for the towns along the Mississippi River were 
actually appointed and sent out in the fleet ! The 
situation, so far as British intentions went, was thus 
extremely threatening. Even had nothing of all this 
been accomplished beyond the conquest of New 
Orleans, when we remember what annoyance so weak 
a nation as Spain had been able to inflict upon us dur- 
ing the twenty years preceding 1803, we can imagine 
how insufferable it would have been had the mouth of 
the Mississippi passed under the control of the greatest 
naval power in the world. 

When Jackson rode into New Orleans on the 2d of 
December, 18 14, he was so worn out by disease and so 
jaded by his long journey in the saddle that the fittest 
place for him was the hospital, and almost any other 
man would have gone there. But in the hawklike 
glare of his eye there shone forth a spirit as indomi- 
table as ever dwelt in human frame. His activity dur- 
ing the following weeks was well-nigh incredible. 
There was one time when he is said to have gone five 
days and four nights without sleep. Before his arrival 
there was dire confusion and consternation, but his 
energy soon restored order, and there was something 
in his manner that inspired confidence. He never 
for a moment admitted the possibility of defeat, he 
never doubted, fumbled, or hesitated, but always saw 
at a glance the end to be reached, and went straight 
toward it without losing a moment. At first it rather 



FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 249 

took people's breath away when upon his own respon- 
sibility he put the city under martial law. But an 
autocrat upon whom so much reliance was placed 
found ready obedience, and the strictest discipline was 
maintained. Women are apt to be quick in recogniz- 
ing the true hero, and from the outset all the women 
of New Orleans had faith in Jackson. His stately 
demeanour and graceful politeness were much admired. 
On the day of his arrival Edward Livingston, who was 
now to be his aide-de-camp, invited him home to dinner. 
The beautiful Mrs. Livingston was then the leader of 
fashionable society in New Orleans. That day she 
had a dozen young ladies to dinner, and just as they 
were about to sit down there came the startling news 
that General Jackson was on his way to join the party. 
There was anxious curiosity as to how the uncouth 
queller of Indians would look and behave. When he 
entered the room, tall and stately in his uniform of blue 
cloth and yellow buckskin, all were amazed at his 
courtly manners, and it was not long before all were 
charmed with his pleasant and kindly talk. After 
dinner he had no sooner left the house than the young 
ladies in chorus exclaimed to Mrs. Livingston : " Is 
this your backwoodsman .? Why, madam, he is a 
prince ! " ^ Many years afterward Josiah Quincy, mem- 
ber of a committee for receiving President Jackson on 
his visit to Boston, was in like manner astonished at 
his urbanity and grace. He had the dignity that goes 
with entire simplicity of nature, and the ease that 
comes from unconsciousness of self. 

One of Jackson's latest biographers observes that in 
this campaign everything fell out favourably for him, 

^ Parton, II. 31. 



250 ANDREW JACKSON 

" as if by magic." ^ But if there was any magic in the 
case, it lay in the bold initiative by which he got the 
game into his own hands and kept it there. As soon 
as he heard of the landing of the British, he went forth 
to attack them, rightly believing that their ignorance 
of the country might be set off against their superb 
discipline. He made a spirited night attack upon 
their camp, while from the river the heavy guns of the 
schooner Caroliiia raked them with distressing charges 
of grape. The effect was to check the enemy's prog- 
ress and give Jackson time to complete his intrench- 
ments in a very strong position which he had chosen, 
near the Bienvenue and Chalmette plantations, on the 
east side of the river. On the farther side he placed 
the militia of Kentucky and Louisiana, under General 
Morgan. The British numbered twelve thousand men 
under command of Wellington's brother-in-law, the 
gallant Sir Edward Pakenham. To oppose these vet- 
erans of the Spanish peninsula, Jackson had six thou- 
sand of that sturdy race whose fathers had vanquished 
Ferguson at King's Mountain, and whose children so 
nearly vanquished Grant at Shiloh. On the 8th of 
January Pakenham was unwise enough to try to over- 
whelm his adversary by a direct assault all along the 
line. It was repeating Bunker Hill and anticipating 
Cold Harbor. On the west bank, indeed, the British 
weight of numbers prevailed, pushed the militia out of 
the way, and seemed to open a chance for turning 
Jackson's position. But all this was rendered futile 
by the stupendous catastrophe on the eastern bank. 
" Don't waste any shots, boys," said Jackson, as the 
long lines of redcoats were seen approaching, '* make 

^ Sumner, 39. 



FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 25 1 

every shot tell ; we must finish this business to-day, 
you know." We may well believe that these faultless 
marksmen, who thought nothing of bringing down a 
squirrel from the top of the tallest tree, wasted very few 
shots indeed. In just twenty-five minutes the British 
were in full retreat, leaving twenty-six hundred of 
their number killed and wounded. " The field," said an 
officer, " was so thickly strewn with the dead, that from 
the American ditch you could have walked forward 
for a quarter of a mile on the bodies." " In some places 
whole platoons lay together, as if killed by the same 
discharge." ^ Without a sound of exultation the 
Americans looked on the dreadful scene in melan- 
choly silence, and presently detachments of them were 
busy in assuaging the thirst and bathing the wounds 
of those in whom life was left. Among the slain was 
Pakenham himself. The American loss was only 
eight killed and thirteen wounded, because the enemy 
were mown down too quickly to return an effective 
fire. Never, perhaps, in the history of the world, has 
a battle been fought between armies of civilized men 
with so great a disparity of loss. It was also the most 
complete and overwhelming defeat that any English 
army has ever experienced. It outdid even Bannock- 
burn. News travelled so slowly then that this great 
victory, like the three last naval victories of the war, 
occurred after peace had been made by the commis- 
sioners at Ghent. Nevertheless, no American can 
regret that the battle was fought. Not only the inso- 
lence and rapacity of Great Britain had richly deserved 
such castigation, but if she had once gained a foothold 
in the Mississippi Valley, it might have taken an armed 

iParton, II. 209. 



252 ANDREW JACKSON 

force to dislodge her, in spite of the treaty ; for in the 
matter of the western frontier posts after 1783 she had 
by no means acted in good faith. Jackson's victory de- 
cided that henceforth the Mississippi Valley belonged 
indisputably to the people of the United States. It 
was the recollection of that victory, along with the 
exploits of Hull and Decatur, Perry and Macdonough, 
which caused the Holy Alliance to look upon the 
Monroe Doctrine as something more than an idle 
threat. All over the United States the immediate 
effect of the news was electric ; and it was enhanced 
by the news of peace which arrived a few days later. 
By this " almost incredible victory," as the National 
Intelligencer called it, the credit of the American arms, 
upon land, was fully restored. Not only did the ad- 
ministration glory in it, as was natural, but the opposi- 
tion lauded it for a different reason, as an example of 
what American military heroism could do in spite of 
inadequate support from government. Thus praised 
by all parties, Jackson, who before the Creek War had 
been little known outside of Tennessee, became at 
once the foremost man in the United States. People 
in the North, while throwing up their hats for him, 
were sometimes heard to ask: "Who is this General 
Jackson .5* To what state does he belong.?" Hence- 
forth, until the Civil War, he occupied the most promi- 
nent place in the popular mind. 

After his victory Jackson remained three months 
in New Orleans, in some conflict with the civil au- 
thorities of the town, which he found it necessary to 
hold under martial law. In April he returned to 
Nashville, still retaining his military command of the 
Southwest. He soon became involved in a quarrel 



FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 253 

with Mr. Crawford, the Secretary of War, who had 
undertaken to modify some provisions in his treaty 
with the Creeks. Jackson was also justly incensed by 
the occasional issue of orders from the War Department 
directly to his subordinate officers ; such orders some- 
times stupidly thwarted his plans. The usual course 
for a commanding general thus annoyed would be to 
make a private representation to the government. But 
here, as ordinarily, while quite right in his position, 
Jackson was violent and overbearing in his methods. 
He published, April 22, 181 7, an order forbidding 
his subordinate officers to pay heed to any order from 
the War Department unless issued through him. Mr. 
Calhoun, who in October succeeded Crawford as Sec- 
retary of War, gracefully yielded the point, but the 
public had meanwhile been somewhat scandalized by 
the collision of authorities. In private conversation 
General Scott had alluded to Jackson's conduct as 
savouring of mutiny. This led to an angry corre- 
spondence between the two generals, ending in a chal- 
lenge from Jackson, which Scott declined on the 
ground that duelling is a wicked and unchristian 
custom. 

Affairs in Florida now demanded attention. That 
country had become a nest of outlaws, and chaos 
reigned supreme there. Many of the defeated Creeks 
had found a refuge in Florida ; and runaway negroes 
from the plantations of Georgia and South Carolina 
were continually escaping thither. During the late 
war British officers and adventurers, acting on their 
own responsibility upon this neutral soil, committed 
many acts which their government would never have 
sanctioned. They stirred up Indians and negroes to 



254 ANDREW JACKSON 

commit atrocities on the United States frontier. The 
Spanish government was at that time engaged in war- 
fare with its revolted colonies in South America, and 
the coasts of Florida became a haunt for contraband 
traders, privateers, and filibusters. One adventurer 
would announce his intention to make Florida a free 
republic ; another would go about committing robbery 
on his own account ; a third would set up an agency 
for kidnapping negroes on speculation. The disorder 
was hideous. On the Apalachicola River the British 
had built a fort, and amply stocked it with arms and 
ammunition, to serve as a base of operations against 
the United States. On the departure of the British, 
the fort was seized and held by negroes. This 
alarmed the people of Georgia, and in July, 1816, 
United States troops, with permission from the Span- 
ish authorities, marched in and bombarded the negro 
fort. A hot shot found its way into the magazine, 
three hundred negroes were blown into fragments, 
and the fort was demolished. In this case the Span- 
iards were ready to leave to United States troops a 
disagreeable work for which their own force was 
incompetent. Every day made it plainer that Spain 
was quite unable to preserve order in Florida, and for 
this reason the United States entered upon negotia- 
tions for the purchase of that country. Meanwhile 
the turmoil increased. White men were murdered by 
Indians, and United States troops under Colonel 
Twiggs captured and burned a considerable Seminole 
village known as Fowltown. The Indians retaliated 
by a wholesale massacre of fifty people who were 
ascending the Apalachicola River in boats ; some of 
the victims were tortured with firebrands. Jackson 



FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 255 

was now ordered to the frontier. He wrote at once 
to President Monroe, " Let it be signified to me 
through any channel (say Mr. John Rhea) that the 
possession of the Floridas would be desirable to the 
United States, and in sixty days it will be accom- 
plished." Mr. Rhea was a representative from Ten- 
nessee, a confidential friend of both Jackson and 
Monroe. The President was ill when Jackson's letter 
reached him, and does not seem to have given it due 
consideration. On referring to it a year later he could 
not remember that he had ever seen it before. Rhea, 
however, seems to have written a letter to Jackson, 
telling him that the President approved of his sugges- 
tion. As to this point the united testimony of Jack- 
son, Rhea, and Judge Overton seems conclusive. 
Afterward Mr. Monroe, through Rhea, seems to have 
requested Jackson to burn this letter, and an entry on 
the general's letter-book shows that it was accordingly 
burnt, April 12, 181 9. There can be no doubt that, 
whatever the President's intention may have been, or 
how far it may have been correctly interpreted by 
Rhea, the general honestly considered himself author- 
ized to take possession of Florida on the ground that 
the Spanish government had shown itself incompetent 
to prevent the denizens of that country from engaging 
in hostilities against the United States. Jackson 
acted upon this belief with his accustomed prompt- 
ness. He raised troops in Tennessee and neighbour- 
ing states, invaded Florida in March, 18 18, captured 
St. Mark's, and pushed on to the Seminole headquar- 
ters on the Suwanee River. In less than three 
months from this time he had overthrown the Indians 
and brought order out of chaos. His measures were 



256 ANDREW JACKSON 

praised by his friends as vigorous, while his enemies 
stigmatized them as high-handed. In one instance 
his conduct was certainly open to question. At St. 
Mark's his troops captured an aged Scotch trader and 
friend of the Indians, named Alexander Arbuthnot; 
near Suwanee, some time afterward, they seized Rob- 
ert Ambrister, a young English lieutenant of marines, 
nephew of the governor of New Providence. Jackson 
believed that these men had incited the Indians to 
make war upon the United States and were now en- 
gaged in aiding and abetting them in their hostilities. 
They were tried by a court-martial at St. Mark's. On 
evidence which surely does not to-day seem fully con- 
clusive, Arbuthnot was found guilty and sentenced to 
be hanged. Appearances were more strongly against 
Ambrister. He did not make it clear what his busi- 
ness was in Florida, and threw himself upon the mercy 
of the court, which at first condemned him to be shot, 
but on further consideration commuted the sentence to 
fifty lashes and a year's imprisonment. Jackson arbi- 
trarily revived the first sentence, and Ambrister was 
accordingly shot. A few minutes afterward Arbuth- 
not was hanged from the yard-arm of his own ship, 
declaring with his last breath that his country would 
avenge him. In this affair Jackson unquestionably 
acted from a stern sense of duty ; as he himself said, 
" My God would not have smiled on me had I pun- 
ished only the poor, ignorant savages, and spared the 
white men who set them on." Here, as on some other 
occasions, however, when under the influence of strong 
feeling, it may be doubted if he was to the full extent 
capable of estimating evidence. It is, however, very 
probable that the men were guilty.' 



FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 257 

On his way home, hearing that some Indians had 
sought refuge in Pensacola, Jackson captured the 
town, turned out the Spanish governor, and left a 
garrison of his own there. He had now virtually 
conquered Florida, but he had moved rather too fast 
for the government at Washington. He had gone 
further, perhaps, than was permissible in trespassing 
upon neutral territory ; and his summary execution of 
two British subjects aroused furious excitement in 
England. For a moment we seemed on the verge of 
war with Great Britain and Spain at once. Whatever 
authority President Monroe may have intended, 
through the Rhea letter, to confer upon Jackson, he 
certainly felt that the general had gone too far. With 
one exception all his cabinet agreed with him that it 
would be best to disavow Jackson's acts and make 
reparation for them. But John Quincy Adams, Secre- 
tary of State, was in point of boldness not unlike Jack- 
son. He felt equal to the task of dealing with the 
two foreign powers, and upon his advice the adminis- 
tration decided to assume the responsibility for what 
Jackson had done. Pensacola and St. Mark's were 
restored to Spain, and an order of Jackson's for the 
seizing of St. Augustine was countermanded by the 
President. But Adams represented to Spain that 
the American general, in his invasion of Florida, was 
virtually assisting the Spanish government in main- 
taining order there; and to Great Britain he justified 
the execution of Arbuthnot and Ambrister on the 
ground that their conduct had been such that they 
had forfeited their allegiance and become virtual out- 
laws. Spain and Great Britain accepted the explana- 
tions ; had either nation felt in the mood for war with 



258 ANDREW JACKSON 

the United States, it might have been otherwise. As 
soon as the administration had adopted Jackson's 
measures, they were for that reason attacked in Con- 
gress by Clay, whose opposition was at this time 
factious, and this was the beginning of the bitter and 
Hfelong feud between Jackson and Clay. In 18 19 the 
purchase of Florida from Spain was effected, and in 
1 82 1 Jackson was appointed governor of that territory. 
The victorious general was now in his fifty-fifth 
year. Until the age of forty-five he had been little 
known outside of Tennessee. It was then that the 
Creek War gave him his opportunity, and revealed 
the fact that there was a great general among us. 
Since the battle of New Orleans he had come to be 
as much a hero in America as Wellington in Eng- 
land. The Iron Duke was never once defeated in 
battle, but if he had ever come to blows with Old 
Hickory, I do not feel absolutely sure that the record 
might not have been broken. Jackson's boldness and 
tenacity were combined with a fertility in resources 
that made him, like Boots in the fairy tales, every- 
where invincible. Alike in war and in politics we 
already begin to see him always carrying the day. 
One can see that the election of such a man to the 
presidency would be likely to mark an era in Ameri- 
can history. One sees in Jackson a representative 
man. His virtues and his faults were largely those of 
the frontier society that in those days lived west of the 
Alleghanies. His election to the presidency was the 
first great political triumph of that Western country 
which Gouverneur Morris wished to see always kept 
in leading-strings. The significance of this triumph I 
shall try to point out in my next paper. 



FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 259 



Note, An Unpublished Letter of Andrew Jackson. 

Through the courtesy of the late Colonel Thomas Tasker Gantt 
of St. Louis, Missouri, Dr. Fiske's attention was directed to an un- 
published letter of Jackson's, written by the general in 1818 to his 
friend, the Hon. G. W. Campbell, minister to Russia, concerning 
affairs in Florida. Dr. Fiske made an exact copy, which is given 
below, an interesting example, not only of the writer's virility of 
expression, but of his well-known peculiarities of spelling. Of 
these peculiarities General Jackson was himself well aware. That 
he was also drolly indifferent to all conventional rules of orthog- 
raphy appears from an extract of correspondence between Colonel 
Gantt and Mrs. Elizabeth B. Lee, daughter of the distinguished 
Virginian, Francis P. Blair, and sister to Montgomery Blair of 
Lincoln's cabinet. From the lifelong intimacy of the Blairs and 
the Jacksons, Mrs. Lee was often, as a girl, a guest at " The 
Hermitage " and at the White House. " Once," she writes, 
" when copying a letter for him I protested against his spelling 
which three different ways on one page and wanted him to alter 
it, but he would not, and said laughingly that he could make him- 
self understood, and that as I was a copyist, I had better spell it 
as I found it ; then he added, more seriously, that at the age when* 
most young people learn to spell he was working for his living and 
helping the best of mothers." 

Chekesaw Nation Treaty Ground, 

Oct' 5"^ 1818. 
D'Sir 

I know you will be astonished at receiving an answer to your 
very friendly letter of the 22*^ July last at this distant day and from 
this place. Your letter came to hand by due course of mail, but 
found me sick in bed — that I could not comply with your request 
or my own wishes by giving it a speedy answer. It was some 
time before I recovered so as to use a pen, and when I did, I 
found myself surrounded by letters and communications relative 
to my official duties that occupied my whole time that I was able 
to attend to business untill the arrival of Governor Shelby of 
Kentucky with whom I was joined in commission to hold a treaty 
with this nation for a surrender of their right to all lands within 



26o ANDREW JACKSON 

the states of Tennessee and Kentucky. We arrived here on the 
29* ult. and found everything wrong : an agent unacquainted 
with Indians, the geography of the country, or even what was the 
wishes of the government, and not half the nation notified of the 
time or place of meeting. Runners have gone to all parts of 
the nation to collect them : we are waiting their arrival and I am 
thereby afforded a leisure moment to answer your friendly letter. 

It affords me much pleasure to see the polite attention of the 
eastern people towards you. This shows a spirit of harmony 
towards the southern and western people that I hope will grow 
into permanent harmony between the two interests, and that vio- 
lence of party spirit and bickering will cease to exist in our happy 
country. 

On the subject of my taking Pensacola I regret that the Govern- 
ment had not furnished you with a copy of my report from Fts 
Gadsden and Montgomery. This would have given you a full 
view of the whole ground. You are advised of the situation of 
our southern frontier when I was ordered to take the field and put 
a speedy end to the conflict with the Seminoles, &c., &c. Our 
frontier when I reached it was reeking with the blood of our 
women and children and the masacre of Lt. Scott. When I 
reached Ft. Scott I found it out of supplies and no alternative left 
me but to abandon the campaign, or to force my way to the bay 
of Appalachicola and risque meeting supplies I had ordered from 
N. Orleans. I chose the latter — and succeeded. Having ob- 
tained eight days rations for my men I immediately marched on 
Muckasookey, where the strength of the enemy was collected, first 
apprising the Governor of Pensacola why I had entered the 
Floridas, to wit, not as the enemy but as the friend of Spain ; as 
Spain had acknowledged her incapacity, through her weakness to 
control the Indians within her terrritory and keep them at peace 
with the United States, self-defence justified our entering her 
territory and doing that for her which she had bound herself to 
do by solem treaty — that as I was engaged fighting the battles 
of Spain I had a right and did calculate on receiving all the facili- 
ties in the power of the agents of Spain that would aid me in put- 
ting a speedy end to the war ; advising the Governor in the same 
letter that I had ordered supplies up the for my army to 

Ft Crawford, which I trusted would be permitted to pass unmolested 



/::;; 



FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 261 

without any delay occasioned by the agents of Spain, but should 
I be disappointed in my expectation of the friendly dispositions 
of the agents of Spain, or should my supplies be interrupted by 
them, I SHOULD view it as an act of war and treat it accord- 
ingly. I received in answer to this friendly letter a positive 
declaration that my provisions should not pass ; the supplies were 
by the Governor seized at Pensacola under a demand of transit 
duties, and my whole army thereby made subject to starvation, 
and which I never got until I entered Pensacola. I proceeded 
against Muckasookey, routed and dispersed the enemy, taking 
some prisoners from whom I learned that the Indians received all 
their supplies of ammunition from Ft Marks thirty miles distant, 
and that the noted and notorious Francis the prophet and his 
party had retired to St. Marks with all his booty taken from Ft 
Scott ; and Inchqueen and his party had retired there also — that 
the ballance of the Indians had fled to the negroes on the Sewan- 
ney [Suwanee] river. I was also informed by the Governor of 
Pensacola, through captains Call and Gordon, that he expected 
Ft Marks was in the hands of the Indians and negroes, as they 
had made demand of large supplies which the commander was not 
able to comply with, and he was unable to defend the fort. As 
soon as I had collected the corn and cattle for the supply of my 
troops, I marched on Ft Marks — when I reached there I found 
that Francis and party had been in the fort, that the garrison 
had been supplied with the cattle stolen from our frontier, that our 
public stores were the granaries of our enemy, and that the Indians 
had been supplied with all of munitions of war by the comman- 
dant — and that the notorious Arbuthnot was then in the garrison. 
I demanded possession of the garrison to be possessed by my 
troops during the war, and untill Spain could reinforce it with as 
many troops as would insure the safety of our frontier and a ful- 
fillment of the treaty with the U States on the part of Spain. This 
was refused me. I saw across St. Marks river the smoke of my 
enemy ; delay was out of the question. I seized Arbuthnot in the 
garrison and took possession of it. The noted Francis, who had 
just returned with a brigadier general's commission, a good rifle 
and snuff-box presented by the Prince Regent, had been captured 
the day before with four of his followers by Capt. McKeever whose 
vessel! they had visitted, mistaking it for a vessell expected from 



262 ANDREW JACKSON 

England with supplies for the Indians, as he stated. I ordered 
him this principle chief to be hung, and marched the next day for 
Sewanney, where I routed the Indians and negroes, took Ambrister, 
a British officer who headed the negroes, Arbuthnot's schooner 
with all their papers, which led to the conviction and execution of 
Arbuthnot and Capt. Ambrister, both of whom was executed under 
sentence of a court-martial at Ft. Marks. I returned to Ft Gads- 
den, where preparing to disband the militia force I rec^ informa- 
tion that four hundred and fifty Indians had collected in Pensacola, 
was fed by the Governor, and a party furnished by the governor 
had issued forth and in one night slaughtered eighteen of our 
citizens, and that another party had, with the knowledge of the 
governor, and being furnished by him, went out publickly, mur- 
dered a Mr. Stokes and family, and had in open day returned to 
Pensacola and sold the booty, amongst which was the clothing 
of Mr. Stokes. This statement was corroborated by a report of 
Gov. Bibb. I was also informed that the provisions I had ordered 
for the supply of Ft Crawford and my army on board the U. States 
schooner Amelia was seized and detained at Pensacola with a 
small detachment of regulars and six hundred Tennesseans. I 
marched for Pensacola ; whilst on my march thither I was met 
by a protest of the governor of Pensacola, ordering me out of the 
Floridas, or he would oppose force to force and drive me out of 
the territory of Spain. This bold measure of the governor, who 
had alleged weakness as the cause of his non-fulfillment of the 
treaty with the U. States, when united with the facts stated, of 
which I then had positive proof — that at that time a large number 
of the hostile Indians were then in Pensacola, who I had dispersed 
east of the Appalachicola — unmasked the duplicity of the gov- 
ernor and his having aided and abetted the Indians in the war 
against us. I hastened my steps, entered Pensacola, took posses- 
sion of my supplies. The governor had fled from the city to the 
Barancas, where he had strongly fortified himself. I demanded 
possession of the garrison to be held by American troops until a 
guarantee should be given for the fulfillment of the treaty and the 
safety of the frontier. This was denyed. I approached the Bar- 
ancas with one 9"" piece and 5^^ inch howitzer. They opened 
their batteries upon me. It was returned spiritedly and with two 
pieces against forty odd mounted of 24 [pounders?] the white flag 



FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 263 

went up in the evening and the capitulation entered into, which 
you have seen. It is true I had my ladders ready to go over the 
wall which I believe the garrison discovered and was afraid of 
a night attack and surrendered. When the flag was hoisted the [y] 
had three hundred effectives in the garrison — this number of 
Americans would have kept it from combined Urope [Europe]. 
There was one Indian wounded in the garrison and the others 
were sent out in the night across the bay before I got possession. 
Thus Sir I have given you a concise statement of the facts and all 
I regret is that I had not stormed the works, captured the gov- 
ernor, put him on his trial for the murder of Stokes and his family, 
and hung him for the deed. I could adopt no other way to " put 
an end to the war " but by possessing myself of the stronghold 
that was an asylum to the enemy and afforded them the means of 
offence. The officers of Spain having by their acts identified 
themselves with our enemy, became such, and by the law of na- 
tions subjected themselves to be treated as such. Self defence 
justified me in every act I did. I will stand justified before God 
and all Urope, and I regret that our government has extended 
the courtesy to Spain of withdrawing the troops from Pensacola 
before Spain gave a guarantee for the fulfilment of the treaty and 
the safety of our frontier. It was an act of courtesy that nothing 
but the insignificance and weakness of Spain can excuse, but it is 
not my province to find fault with the acts of the government, but 
it may have reason to repent of her clemency. 

Make a tender to your lady of my sincere respects and best wishes 
for her happiness and receive Sir for yourself an expression of my 
unfeigned frendship and esteem — and — [I] remain respectfully 

Yr. mo. ob. serv. 

Andrew Jackson. 

P. S. My eyes are weak and my 
hand trembles I am still weak and 
much debilitated Nothing but the 
hope of being serviceable to the 
wishes of my government and inter- 
est of the state of Tennessee could 
have induced me to have undertaken 
the journey. A. J. 

The Honble 

G. W. Campbell 

Minister at Russia 



264 ANDREW JACKSON 

Endorsed by Mr. Campbell — " Gen. Andrew Jackson, Chicka- 
saw Nation, 5 Oct. 18 18 

Rec<» ^5_^' 18 18-19 
7 Jan' ^ 

Giving an account of the taking possession of Pensacola." 
ans** 8. Sept. 1819. 

This letter was given by Major Campbell Brown of Spring Hill, 
Tennessee (a grandson, I think, of G. W. Campbell), to Colonel 
Gantt ; and Colonel Gantt gave it to the Mercantile Library of 
St. Louis, where it is to be found. — John Fiske. 



VII 
ANDREW JACKSON 

AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 



VII 

ANDREW JACKSON 

AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 

The period comprised between the years 1815 and 
i860 — between our second war with England and our 
great Civil War — was the period in which American 
society was more provincial in character than at any 
time before or since. By provincialism I mean the 
opposite of cosmopolitanism ; I refer to the state of 
things in which the people of a community know very 
little about other communities and care very little for 
foreign ideas and foreign affairs. I do not mean to 
imply that the community thus affected with provin- 
cialism is necessarily backward in its civilization. Pro- 
vincialism is, indeed, one of the marks of backwardness, 
but it is a mark that is often found in the foremost 
communities. No one doubts that England and France 
stand in the front rank among civilized nations ; but 
when a Frenchman in good society thinks that the 
people of the United States talk Spanish, or when a 
college-bred man in England imagines Indians in 
feathers and war-paint prowling in the backwoods near 
Boston, none can doubt that they are chargeable with 
provincialism in a very gross form indeed. This sort 
of dense ignorance is apt to underlie national antipa- 
thies, and when manifested between the different parts 
of a common country it is accountable for what we 

267 



268 ANDREW JACKSON 

call sectional prejudice. Such antipathies are usually- 
ill founded. That human nature which we all possess 
in common is very far from perfect, but after all it is 
encouraging to find, as a general rule, that the better 
we understand people the more we like them. If all 
the bitterness, all the quarrels and bloodshed, that have 
come from sheer downright ignorance were to be elimi- 
nated from the annals of mankind, those annals would 
greatly shrink in volume. It is, therefore, devoutly to 
be wished that provincialism may by and by perish, 
and every encouragement should be given to the 
agencies which are gradually destroying it, such as 
literature, commerce, and travel, enabling the people 
of different countries to exchange ideas and learn 
something about each other's characters. 

American provincialism sixty years ago, however, 
had something about it that was wholesome. A great 
many bad things have their good sides, and in looking 
back upon evils that we have got rid of, we can some- 
times see that they did something toward checking 
other evils. An exceedingly foolish and barbarous 
custom was duelling; but it doubtless served some- 
what to restrain that graceless impudence which some- 
times seems threatening in turn to become a national 
misfortune. So with provincialism ; it had its good; 
side in so far as it was a reaction against the old colo- 
nial spirit which kept our minds in thraldom to Eu- 
rope, and especially to England, long after we had by 
force of arms achieved political independence. Before 
the Revolutionary War we were kept perpetually re- 
minded of England. Most of the colonial governon I 
and revenue ofBcers, and many of the judges, receivec 
their appointments from London. Every change o 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 269 

ministry was fraught with possibilities affecting our 
welfare. Our seaports were familiar with the sight of 
British officials. We depended upon England for fine 
arts and fashions, as well as for a great many of the 
manufactured articles in common use. We read Brit- 
ish historians and essayists, quoted British poets, and 
taught our children out of British text-books. We felt 
that the centre of things was in Europe, while we were 
comparatively raw communities on the edge of a vast 
continent, much of which was still unexplored and the 
greater part of it a wilderness possessed by horrid sav- 
ages. This state of feeling lasted for some time after 
the Revolution. For a quarter of a century our politi- 
cal contests related quite as much to foreign as to 
domestic questions. The horrors of the French Revo- 
lution made the Federalists an English party; they 
looked upon England as the guardian of law and order 
in Europe. The Republicans, on the other hand, ap- 
plauded the overthrow of a miserable despotism and 
sympathized with the ideas of revolutionary France. 
They accused the Federalists of leanings toward mon- 
archy ; they called them aristocrats and snobs, and 
thought it very mean in them to turn a cold shoulder 
to the people who had helped us win our independence. 
But it was not merely a question of our sympathies ; 
we were really forced into taking sides. During nearly 
the whole of this period France and England were at 
war with each other, and in accordance with the bar- 
baric system then prevalent, their privateers preyed 
upon the shipping of neutral nations. As we had not 
then discovered how to protect ships out of existence, 
we did a very large and profitable carrying trade. Our 
ships were the best in the world, and no other neutral 



270 ANDREW JACKSON 

nation, unless it may have been Holland, had so many 
on the ocean. This fact kept foreign politics in the 
foreground until the culmination of the long quarrel 
was reached in the War of 18 12-18 15. That war has 
been called, with much propriety, our second war of 
independence. It taught other nations that we were 
not to be insulted with impunity, and it set our politics 
free from European complications. The year 18 15 
marks an epoch on both sides of the Atlantic. It was 
the beginning of thirty years of peace, during which, 
in America as in England, attention could be devoted 
to political and social reforms. Great and exciting 
questions of domestic politics soon came up to occupy 
the attention of Americans, and their thoughts were 
much less intimately concerned with what people were 
saying and doing on the other side of the ocean. We 
also paid less attention to European manners and 
fashions. Our statesmen of the Revolutionary period 
dressed very much like Englishmen, and since the 
Civil War it is so again. But in the intermediate 
period, between 18 15 and i860, we had the bright blue 
coat with brass buttons and the buff waistcoat, such as 
Daniel Webster used to wear when he made those im- 
mortal speeches that did so much to enkindle a pas- 
sionate love for the Union and make it strong enough 
to endure the shock of war. That blue dress-coat with 
brass buttons was the visible symbol of the period of 
narrow, boastful, provincial, but wholesome and much- 
needed, Americanism. 

Now, this feeling of Americanism grew up more 
rapidly and acquired greater intensity in the new 
states west of the mountains than in the old states 
on the seaboard. Observe the surprising rapidity 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 27 1 

with which these new states were formed, as the 
obstacles to migration were removed. The chief 
obstacles had been the hostility of the Indians, and 
the difficulty of getting from place to place. During 
the late war the Indian power had been broken by 
Harrison in the North and by Jackson ^ in the South. 
In 1807 Robert Fulton had invented the steamboat. 
In 181 1 a steamboat was launched on the Ohio River 
at Pittsburg, and presently such nimble craft were 
plying on all the Western rivers, carrying settlers and 
traders, farm produce and household utensils. This 
gave an immense impetus to the Western migration. 
After Ohio had been admitted to the Union in 1802, 
ten years had elapsed before the next state, Louisiana, 
was added. But in six years after the war a new 
state was added every year: Indiana in 18 16, Missis- 
sippi in 181 7, Illinois in 18 18, Alabama in 18 19, Maine 
in 1820, Missouri in 182 1 ; all but one of them west of 
the Alleghanies, one of them west of the Mississippi. 
In President Monroe's second term, while there were 
thirty senators from the Atlantic states, there were al- 
ready eighteen from the West. It was evident that 
the political centre of gravity was moving westward 
at a very rapid rate. 

In the new Southern states thus created below the 
thirty-sixth parallel the South Carolinian type of 
society prevailed. In all the others there was an ex- 
tensive and complicated mixing of people from dif- 
ferent Atlantic states. Toward 1840, after Ericsson's 

^ " It has been pleasant too to revise many of my ideas and opinions : 
for my youthful memories go back to the days when Jackson was like a 
bogy to frighten naughty children ! Boston was a place of one idea then." 
Extract from a letter of Mr. James Day to Dr. Fiske. 



272 ANDREW JACKSON 

invention of the screw propeller had set up the new 
migration of foreigners from Europe, and after the 
great stream of New Englanders had begun to pour 
into the Northwest, the mixing became still more 
complicated. The effect of this was excellent in 
shaking men's ideas out of the old ruts, in bringing 
together people of somewhat various habits and 
associations, in breaking down artificial social dis- 
tinctions, in broadening the range of sympathy, and 
in adding to the heartiness and cordiality of manner. 
This new society was much more completely demo- 
cratic than that of the Atlantic states, and it soon 
began powerfully to react upon the latter. During 
the period of which I am speaking most of the states 
remodelled or amended their constitutions in such 
wise as to make them more democratic. There was 
an extension of the suffrage, a shortening of terms 
of office, and a disposition to make all offices elective. 
There was much that was wholesome in this demo- 
cratic movement, but there was also some crudeness, 
and now and then a lamentable mistake was made. 
Perhaps the worst instance was that of electing judges 
for limited terms instead of having them appointed 
for life or during good behaviour. In particular cases 
the system may work fairly well, but its general ten- 
dency is demoralizing to bench and bar alike, and I 
believe it to be one of the most crying abominations 
by which our country is afflicted. Taken in connec- 
tion with the disposition to seek violent redress for 
injuries, and with the mawkish humanitarianism of 
which criminals are so quick to take advantage, it 
has done much to diminish the security of life and 
property and to furnish a valid excuse for the rough 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 273 

and ready methods of Judge Lynch. It is encourag- 
ing to observe at the present time some symptoms 
of a disposition to return to the older and sounder 
method of making judges. Good sense is so strongly 
developed among our people that we may reasonably 
calculate upon their profiting by hard experience and 
correcting their own errors in the long run. It is 
far better that popular errors should be corrected in 
this way than by some beneficent autocratic power, 
or by some set of people supposed to be wiser than 
others ; and this, I believe, is the true theory of de- 
mocracy. This is the vital point which Jefferson 
understood so much more clearly than Hamilton and 
the Federalists. 

But in the period of which I am speaking, the 
theory of democracy was not usually taken so moder- 
ately as this. There was a kind of democratic fanati- 
cism in the air. A kind of metaphysical entity called 
the People (spelled with a capital) was set up for men 
to worship. Its voice was the voice of God ; and, like 
the king, it could do no wrong. It had lately been 
enthroned in America, and was going shortly to 
renovate the world. People began to forget all about 
the slow growth of our constitutional liberty through 
ages of struggle in England and Scotland. They be- 
gan to forget all about our own colonial period, with 
its strongly marked characters and its political lessons 
of such profound significance. A habit grew up, 
which has not yet been outgrown, of talking about 
American history as if it began in 1776, an error as 
fatal to all correct understanding of the subject as that 
which Englishmen used to make in ignoring their 
own history prior to the Norman Conquest. We 



2/4 ANDREW JACKSON 

began to look upon our federal Constitution as if it 
had been suddenly created by an act of miraculous 
wisdom, and had no roots in European soil. It was 
telt that our institutions were hedged about by a kind 
of divinity, and that by means of them we had become 
better than other nations ; and, in our implicit reliance 
upon the infallible wisdom of the people, we went to 
work at legislation and at constitution-making in a 
much less sober spirit than to-day. As for Europe, 
we exaggerated its political shortcomings most egre- 
giously, and failed to see that it could have any political 
lessons for us. The expressions most commonly heard 
about Europe were "pauper labor" and "effete dy- 
nasties." People seldom crossed the ocean to look at 
things over there with their own eyes. The feeling 
with which children then grew up found expression 
a little later in such questions as, " What do we care 
for abroad } " A gentleman who has been speaker of 
the House of Representatives and major-general in 
the army once said in a public speech that too much 
time was spent in studying the history of England ; 
we had much better study that of the North American 
Indians ; it was quite enough to know something about 
the continent we live on, the rest of the world was 
hardly worth knowing. At one time even the pronun- 
ciation of the word European seemed in danger of 
being forgotten ; it was quite commonly pronounced 
£ur6pia7t. 

Those were the days of spread-eagle oratory on the 
Fourth of July, and whenever people were assembled 
in public, the days when ministers in the pulpit used 
to thank Heaven that "in spite of all temptations to 
belong to other nations " we had been born Americans. 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 275 

They were the days when Elijah Pagram could silence 
all cavillers by reminding them that " our bright home 
is in the settin' sun." More summary were the meth- 
ods of Mr. Hannibal Chollop. " Do you see this 
pistol ? " said he to Martin Chuzzlewit. " I shot a man 
down with it the other day in the state of Illinois. I 
shot him for asserting in the Spartan Portico^ a tri- 
weekly journal, that the ancient Athenians went ahead 
of the present locofoco ticket." Very few eminent 
persons from England visited the United States in 
those days, and it was quite natural that those who did 
should feel called upon, after going home, to write 
books recording their impressions of the country and 
the people. Such books, even when written in a 
friendly spirit, were sure to give mortal offence to the 
Americans, simply because it was impossible for the 
writers, without making themselves ridiculous, to 
pile up superlatives enough to satisfy our national 
vanity. When one reads Dickens's " American Notes," 
in which he treats us seriously, one finds it hard to 
understand the storm of indignation which it aroused, 
except that he did indeed touch upon one very sensi- 
tive spot, the incongruity between negro slavery and 
our fine talk about the rights of man. In " Martin 
Chuzzlewit " he made fun of us ; but the good-natured 
banter which enraged our fathers only makes us laugh 
to-day. Dickens was friendly, Mrs. Trollope was not. 
" To speak plainly," said she, " I do not like the 
Americans." The poor woman had entered our 
country by what was then one of its back doors. She 
had landed at New Orleans and gone up by river 
to Cincinnati, where circumstances obliged her to live 
for more than a year in the old times when countless 



276 ANDREW JACKSON 

pigs ran wild in the unpaved streets of the frontier 
town. Any one who wishes to understand American 
democracy sixty years ago should read her book. It 
is evidently a truthful account of a state of society in 
which very few of us would find it pleasant to live, and 
it is amusing to see the naivete with which the writer's 
expressions become mollified as on her homeward 
journey she reaches Philadelphia and New York. It 
is noticeable that the examples of Americanism quoted 
by English travellers of that day were almost always 
taken from the West. They had very little to say 
about Boston because it was too much like an Eng- 
lish town. They came in search of novelty and found 
it in the valley of the Mississippi, as they now find it 
in the Rocky Mountains. 

No such novelty, however, can the European trav- 
eller find anywhere in the United States to-day as 
that which so astonished him half a century ago. 
The period of provincialism which I have sought to 
describe came to an end with our Civil War. The 
overthrow of slavery removed one barrier to the sym- 
pathy between America and western Europe. The 
sacrifices we had to make in order to save our coun- 
try intensified our love for it, but diminished our 
boastfulness. In a chastened spirit we were enabled 
to see that even in American institutions there might 
be elements of weakness, that perhaps the experience 
of other nations might have lessons worthy of our 
study, and that the whole world is none too wide a 
field wherefrom to gather wisdom. Moreover, the 
railroad and telegraph, two of the mightiest agencies 
yet devised for hastening the millennium, have already 
wrought a marvellous transformation, which is but the 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 277 

harbinger of greater transformations, in the opinions 
and sentiments and mental habits of men and women 
in all civilized countries. Nowhere have the compli- 
cated effects been more potent or more marked than 
in the United States. Ever^' part of our vast domain 
has been brought into easy contact with all four quar- 
ters of the globe. Australia and Zululand are less 
remote from us to-day than England was in Jackson's 
time. We go back and forth across the Atlantic in 
crowds, and we exchange ideas with the whole world. 
We are becoming daily more and more cosmopolitan, 
and are, perhaps, as much in the centre of things as 
any people. 

However, as I said a moment ago, the old provin- 
cial spirit of Americanism was in its day eminently 
useful and wholesome. The swagger and tall talk 
was simply the bubbling forth that accompanied the 
fermentation of a vigorous and hopeful national spirit, 
but for which we might long before this have been 
broken up into a group of little spiteful, squabbling 
republics, with custom-houses and sentinels in uni- 
form scattered along every state line. The second 
war with England was the first emphatic assertion of 
this national spirit. Before that time the sentiment 
of union was weak. In 1786 nearly all the states 
were, for various reasons, snarling and showing their 
teeth. In 1799 Kentucky uttered a growl in which 
something was heard that sounded like nullification. 
In 1804 Timothy Pickering dallied with a scheme, to 
which it was hoped that Aaron Burr might lend assist- 
ance, for a Northern confederacy of New England and 
New York, with the possible addition of New Jersey 
and Pennsylvania. In 1808 some of the New Eng- 



278 ANDREW JACKSON 

land Federalists, enraged at Jefferson's embargo, enter- 
tained thoughts of secession, and in 18 14 there was 
mischief brewing at Hartford. It was the result of 
the war with Great Britain that dealt the first stagger- 
ing blow to these separatist tendencies. In that grand 
result, so far as the naval victories were concerned, the 
chief credit was won by New England, and it went far 
toward setting the popular sentiment in that part of 
the country out of gear with the schemes of the moss- 
back Federalist leaders. But as regarded the land 
victories and the whole political situation, the chief 
credit accrued to the West. It was the much-loved 
statesman, " Harry of the West," the eloquent Henry 
Clay, that had prevailed upon the country to appeal 
to arms, in spite of the wrath of the New Englanders 
and the misgivings of President Madison. It was the 
invincible soldier of Tennessee that crowned the work 
with a prodigious victory. Had the war ended simply 
with the treaty of Ghent, which did not give us quite 
so much as we wanted, the discontent of New Eng- 
land would probably have continued. It was the battle 
of New Orleans that killed New England federalism. 
It struck a chord of patriotic feeling to which the peo- 
ple of New England responded promptly. The Fed- 
eralist leaders were at once discredited, and not a man 
that had gone to the Hartford convention but had 
hard work, for the rest of his life, to regain the full 
confidence of his fellow-citizens. In the presidential 
election of 181 6 the Federalists still contrived to get 
thirty-four electoral votes for Rufus King. In 1820 
they did not put forward any candidate; their party 
was dead and buried. All but one of the electoral 
votes were given to James Monroe. One elector cast 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 279 

his vote for John Quincy Adams, just as a matter of 
form, in order that no President after Washington 
might be chosen by an absolutely unanimous vote. 

This was what we called the " era of good feeling." 
The war had disposed of the old issues, and the new 
ones had not yet shaped themselves. As all the can- 
didates for the election of 1824 were called Republi- 
cans, the issues between them seemed to be purely of 
a personal nature. There was a genuine political 
force at work, however, and a very strong one. This 
was the spirit of reaction against European ideas, the 
bumptious and boisterous democratic Americanism of 
the young West. The backwoodsmen and Mississippi 
traders were to be represented in the White House, in 
spite of Virginia planters and Harvard professors. 
There was a wish to put an end to what some people 
called the " Virginia dynasty " of Presidents ; and it 
was with this in view that Clay kept up, during Mon- 
roe's administration, an opposition that was sometimes 
factious. It was, for instance, partly because Monroe 
had sanctioned Jackson's measures in Florida, that 
Clay and his friends felt bound to attack them, thus 
laying the foundations of the lifelong feud between 
Clay and Jackson. In 1823, when the latter resigned 
the governorship of Florida and took his seat in the 
United States Senate, he had already been nominated 
by the legislature of Tennessee as the candidate of 
that state for the presidency. Some of his friends, 
under the lead of William Lewis, had even two years 
earlier conceived the idea of making him President. 
At first General Jackson cast ridicule upon the idea. 
" Do they suppose," said he, " that I am such a d — d 
fool as to think myself fit for President of the United 



28o ANDREW JACKSON 

States ? No, sir. I know what I am fit for. I can 
command a body of men in a rough way ; but I am 
not fit to be President." Such is the anecdote told by 
H. M. Brackenridge, who was Jackson's secretary in 
Florida (Parton, II. 354). At this time the general 
felt old and weak, and had made up his mind to spend 
the remainder of his days in peace on his farm. Of 
personal ambition, as ordinarily understood, Jackson 
seems to have had much less than many other men. 
But he was, like most men, susceptible to flattery, and 
the discovery of his immense popularity no doubt 
went far to persuade him that he might do credit to 
himself as President.^ On the 4th of March, 1824, he 

1 Jackson, Crawford, and Adams in 1824 

(Extract from a manuscript letter of John A. Dix, dated Washington, 22d February, 

1824) 

" Mr. Calhoun's chances of success depended on the course of Pennsyl- 
vania. This state, it appears, will support the hero of New Orleans, and 
Mr. Calhoun's fate is sealed. My opinion is that the West will renounce 
Mr. Clay's persuasion, and will very generally support Gen. Jackson. Mr. 
A., Mr. Crawford, and Gen. J. therefore remain the strong competitors. 
Between these three I have certainly a very decided choice. Mr. Craw- 
ford's connection with the Radical party, his doubtful principles and disin- 
genuous course in the administration forbid me to desire his elevation. 
Mr. A. has extraordinary merits. His extensive acquirements, incorrupti- 
ble morals, and devotion to his country's service furnish him with the 
strongest and most indisputable claims. But he is, I fear, little fitted for 
popular government. No man would administer an absolute system bet- 
ter, because he would never prostitute the possession of power to corrupt 
or tyrannical ends. But I am apprehensive that he will be found to pos- 
sess very little talent for managing men, which is the most important of all 
qualities under a government where the people have so immediate a par- 
ticipation, as under ours, in the business of administration. I fear, there- 
fore, should he be elected, that his administration will be disturbed by 
dangerous and distracting feuds. Swayed by apprehensions like these, 
... I am strongly inclined to wish for Gen. Jackson's success. The 
character of this great man is not at all understood. He has been induced 
to adopt violent measures for the attainment of useful ends, but I am con- 
vinced by what I have seen this winter, that he is a good man, and that he 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 28 1 

was nominated In a frenzy of enthusiasm by a conven- 
tion at Harrisburg, in Pennsylvania. The regular 
nominee of the congressional caucus was W. H. Craw- 
ford of Georgia. The other candidates were Henry 
Clay and John Quincy Adams. For the Vice-presi- 
dent there was a general agreement upon Calhoun. 
There was no opposition between the Northern and 
the Southern states. Such an issue had been raised 
for a moment in 1820, but the Missouri Compromise 
had settled it so effectually that it was not to be heard 
of again for several years, and the credit of this had been 
largely due to Clay. All the four candidates belonged 
nominally to the Republican party, but in their attitude 
toward the Constitution Adams and Clay were loose 
constructionists, while Crawford and Jackson were 
strict constructionists, and in this difference was fore- 
shadowed a new division of parties. At the election 
in November, 1824, Mr. Crawford, who stood for the 
" Virginia dynasty " in a certain sense, received the 
entire electoral votes of Georgia and Virginia, with 5 
votes from New York, 2 from Delaware, and i from 
Maryland. Mr. Adams had all the New England 
votes, with 26 from New York, i from Delaware, 3 
from Maryland, i from Illinois, 2 from Louisiana. 
Mr. Clay had the entire vote of Missouri, Kentucky, 
and Ohio, with 4 from New York. General Jackson 
received the entire votes of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, 

knows how to ,s:overn his passions. ... It is a principal object with the 
sound politicians of the country to abolish party distinctions and to elevate 
talent wherever it is found. But as Mr. Adams has been a Federalist, the 
least inclination towards federal men or federal measures would excite 
alarm and disturb his popularity. Gen. Jackson, having always been a 
violent Democrat, might avail himself of the talents of the Federal party 
without danger, and no one believes that he would be a party man." 



282 ANDREW JACKSON 

both Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and 
Indiana, with 7 from Maryland, i from New York, 3 
from Louisiana, and 2 from Illinois. All of Craw- 
ford's 41 electoral votes were from the original sea- 
board states. Of Adams's 84 votes, all but 3 were 
from the same quarter. Of Clay's 37, all but 4 were 
from the West. To Jackson's 99 the West contributed 
29, the East 70. If Jackson could have had Clay's 
Western vote in addition to his own, it would have 
made 132, which was one more than the number nec- 
essary for a choice. The power of the West was thus 
distinctly shown for the first time in a national elec- 
tion. As none of the candidates had a majority, it 
was left for the House of Representatives to choose a 
President from the three names highest on the list, in 
accordance with the twelfth amendment to the Consti- 
tution. Clay was thus rendered ineligible, and there 
was naturally some scheming among the friends of the 
other candidates to secure his powerful cooperation. 
Clay's feeling toward Adams had for some time been 
unfriendly, but on the other hand there was no love 
lost between Jackson and Clay, and the latter was of 
course sincere in his opinion that Adams was a states- 
man and Jackson nothing but a soldier. It was not in 
the least strange, under the circumstances, that Clay 
should throw his influence in favour of Adams. It 
would have been strange if he had not done so. The 
result was that when in the House the vote was taken 
by states, there were 1 3 for Adams, 7 for Jackson, and 
4 for Crawford. Adams thus became President, and 
Jackson's friends, in their bitter disappointment, hun- 
gered for a "grievance " upon which they might vent 
their displeasure, and which might serve as a " rally- 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 283 

ing cry " for the next campaign. Benton went so far 
as to maintain that because Jackson had a greater 
number of electoral votes than any other candidate, 
the House was virtually " defying the will of the peo- 
ple " in choosing any name but his. To this it was 
easily answered that in any case our electoral college, 
which was one of the most deliberately framed devices 
of the Constitution, gives but a very indirect and par- 
tial expression of the " will of the people " ; and 
furthermore, if Benton's arguments were sound, why 
should the Constitution have provided for an election 
by Congress, instead of allowing a simple plurality in 
the college to decide the election ? The extravagance 
of Benton's objection, coming from so able a source, is 
an index to the bitter disappointment of Jackson's fol- 
lowers. The needed " grievance " was furnished when 
Adams selected Clay as his Secretary of State. Many 
of Jackson's friends interpreted this appointment as 
the result of a bargain whereby Clay had made Adams 
President in consideration of obtaining the first place 
in the cabinet, carrying with it, according to the notion 
then prevalent, a fair prospect of the succession to the 
presidency. It was natural enough for the friends of 
a disappointed candidate to make such a charge. It 
was to Benton's credit that he always scouted the idea 
of a corrupt bargain between Adams and Clay. Many 
people, however, believed it. In Congress, John Ran- 
dolph's famous allusion to the " coalition between 
Blifil and Black George — the Puritan and the black- 
leg — " led to a duel between Randolph and Clay, 
which served to impress the matter upon the popular 
mind without enlightening it; the pistol is of small 
value as an agent of enlightenment. The charge was 



284 ANDREW JACKSON 

utterly without support and in every way improbable. 
The excellence of the appointment of Clay was beyond 
cavil, and the sternly upright Adams was less influ- 
enced by what people might think of his actions than 
any other President since Washington. But in this 
case he was perhaps too independent. The appoint- 
ment was no doubt ill-considered. It made it neces- 
saiy for Clay, in many a public speech, to defend him- 
self against the imputation. To mention the charge to 
Jackson, whose course in Florida had been censured 
by Clay, was enough to make him believe it ; and he 
did so to his dying day. 

It is not likely that the use made of this "griev- 
ance " had any decisive effect in securing victory for 
Jackson in 1828. Doubtless it helped him, but the 
causes of his success lay far deeper. The stream of 
democratic tendency was swelling rapidly. Hereto- 
fore our Presidents had been men of aristocratic type, 
with advantages of wealth or education or social train- 
ing. In a marked degree all these advantages were 
united in John Quincy Adams. He was the most 
learned of all our Presidents. He had been a Har- 
vard professor. He was a trained diplomatist, and 
had lived much in Europe. He was an able admin- 
istrative officer. In his character there was real 
grandeur. For bulldog courage and tenacity he 
was much like Jackson, but in other respects a 
stronger contrast than the two men afforded cannot 
well be imagined. Curiously enough, in point of 
politeness and grace of manner, the backwoodsman 
far surpassed the diplomatist. A man with less 
training in statesmanship than Jackson would have 
been hard to find. In his defects he represented 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 285 

average humanity, while his excellences were such 
as the most illiterate citizen could appreciate. In 
such a man the ploughboy and the blacksmith could 
feel that in some essential respects they had for Presi- 
dent one of their own sort. Above all, he was the 
great military hero of the day, and as such he came 
to the presidency as naturally as Taylor and Grant 
in later days, as naturally as his contemporary Wel- 
lington, without any training in statesmanship, be- 
came prime minister of England. A man far more 
politic and complaisant than Adams could not have 
won the election of 1828 against such odds. He 
obtained 83 electoral votes against 178 for Jackson. 
Calhoun was reelected Vice-president. In this elec- 
tion the votes of New York and Maryland were 
divided almost equally between the two candidates. 
Jackson got one electoral vote from Maine. All the 
rest of New England, with New Jersey and Dela- 
ware, went for Adams. Jackson carried Pennsyl- 
vania, Virginia, both Carolinas, and Georgia, and 
everything west of the Alleghanies, from the Lakes 
to the Gulf. There were many Western districts in 
which Adams did not get a single vote. After this 
sweeping victoiy Jackson came to the presidency 
with a feeling that he had at length succeeded in 
making good his claim to a violated right, and this 
feeling had its influence upon his conduct. 

In Jackson's cabinet, as first constituted, Martin 
Van Buren of New York was Secretary of State ; 
S. D. Ingham of Pennsylvania Secretary of the 
Treasury ; J. H. Eaton of Tennessee Secretary of 
War; John Branch of North Carolina Secretary of 
the Navy; J, M. Berrien of Georgia Attorney-gen- 



286 ANDREW JACKSON 

eral ; W. T. Barry of Kentucky Postmaster-general. 
With the exception of Van Buren, as compared with 
members of earlier cabinets, — not merely with such 
men as Hamilton, Madison, or Gallatin, but with 
such as Pickering, Wolcott, Monroe, or even Craw- 
ford, — these were obscure names. The innovation 
in the personal character of the cabinet was even 
more marked than the innovation in the presidency. 
The autocratic Jackson employed his secretaries as 
clerks. His confidential advisers were a few intimate 
friends who held no important offices. These men 
— W. B. Lewis, Amos Kendall, Duff Green, and 
Isaac Hill — came to be known as the "kitchen 
cabinet." Major Lewis was an old friend who had 
much to do with bringing Jackson forward for the 
presidency. The other three were editors of parti- 
san newspapers. Kendall was a man of considerable 
ability and many good qualities, including a plentiful 
supply of those virtuous intentions wherewith a cer- 
tain part of the universe is said to be paved. He 
was what would now be called a " machine politician." 
On many occasions he was the ruling spirit of the 
administration, and the cause of some of its worst 
mistakes. Jackson's career cannot be fully under- 
stood without taking into account the agency of 
Kendall; yet it is not always easy to assign the 
character and extent of the influence which he 
exerted. 

A yet more notable innovation was Jackson's treat- 
ment of the civil service. This was the great blunder 
and scandal of his administration, and because we are 
still suffering from its effects it is in the minds of the 
present generation more closely associated with Jack- 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 287 

son's name than all his good work. The abominable 
slough of debauchery in which our civil service has 
wallowed for half a century is not only a disgrace to 
the American people, but it is probably the most 
serious of all the dangers that threaten the continu- 
ance of American freedom. Its foul but subtle miasma 
poisons and benumbs the whole body politic. The 
virus runs through everything, and helps to sustain all 
manner of abominations, from grasping monopolies 
and civic jobbery down to political rum-shops. And 
for a crowning evil, so long as it stays with us, it is 
next to impossible to get great political questions cor- 
rectly stated and argued on their merits. 

Under all the administrations previous to Jackson's 
our civil service had been conducted with ability and 
purity, and might have been compared favourably with 
that of any other country in the world. The earlier 
Presidents proceeded upon the theory that public office 
is a public trust, and cannot, without base dishonour, 
be treated as a reward for partisan services. They 
conducted the business of government upon sound 
business principles, and as long as a postmaster showed 
himself efficient in distributing the mail, they did not 
turn him out because of his vote. From the first, 
however, there were well-meaning people who could 
not comprehend the wisdom of such a policy. When 
Jefferson's election brought with it a change of party 
at the seat of government, there were some who 
thought it should also bring with it a wholesale change 
of office-holders. But such was not Jefferson's view 
of the case. The name of " Jeffersonian Democrat," 
as applied to a certain class of hungry place-hunters in 
our time, is an atrocious libel upon that great man. 



288 ANDREW JACKSON 

Such people would have gone hungry a great while 
before he would have fed them from the public crib. 
It was strongly urged upon him once that he should 
make room in the custom-house for some persons, 
who, as it was alleged, in helping to elect him Presi- 
dent, had virtually saved the country. " Indeed," re- 
plied Jefferson, " I have heard that the city of Rome 
was once saved by geese ; but I never heard that these 
geese were made revenue ofificers." During the forty 
years between April 30, 1789, and March 4, 1829, the 
total number of removals from office was seventy-four, 
and out of this number five were defaulters. During 
the first year of Jackson's administration the number of 
changes made in the civil service was about two thou- 
sand. Such was the sudden and abrupt inauguration 
upon a national scale of the so-called " spoils system." 
The phrase originated with W. L. Marcy, of New York, 
who in a speech in the Senate in 1831 declared that 
" to the victors belong the spoils." The man who said 
this of course did not realize that he was making one of 
the most infamous remarks recorded in history. There 
was, however, much aptness in his phrase, inasmuch as 
it was a confession that the business of American pol- 
itics was about to be conducted upon principles fit 
only for the warfare of barbarians. The senator from 
New York had been reared in a poisonous atmosphere. 
The " spoils system " was first gradually brought to 
perfection in the state politics of New York and Penn- 
sylvania, and it was inevitable that it should sooner or 
later be introduced into the sphere of national politics. 
There can hardly be a doubt that if Jackson had never 
been President, similar results would have followed at 
about the same time. If Adams had been reelected, the 



, 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 289 

catastrophe would have been deferred for four years, 
but it was bound to come soon. This in no wise 
alters or qualifies Jackson's responsibility for the mis- 
chief, but it helps us to comprehend it in its true rela- 
tions. At that time the notion had firmly planted 
itself in men's minds that there is something especially 
democratic, and therefore meritorious, about "rotation 
in office." It was argued, with that looseness of anal- 
ogy so common in men's reasonings about history and 
politics, that permanency of tenure tends to create an 
" aristocracy of office," and is therefore contrary to the 
"spirit of American institutions." It was, as I said 
before, an age of crude, unintelligent experiments in 
democracy ; and as soon as this notion had once got 
into men's heads, it was inevitable that the experiment 
of the " spoils system " must be tried, just as the exper- 
iment of an elective judiciary had to be tried. The 
way was prepared in 1820 by Crawford, when he suc- 
ceeded in getting the law enacted that limits the 
tenure of office to four years. This dangerous meas- 
ure excited very little discussion at the time. People 
could not understand the evil until taught by hard ex- 
perience. The honest Jackson would have been 
astonished if he had been told that he was laying the 
foundations of a gigantic system of corruption. He 
was very ready to believe ill of political opponents, 
and to make generalizations from extremely inadequate 
data. Democratic newspapers, while the campaign 
frenzy was on them, were full of windy declamation 
about the wholesale corruption introduced into all 
parts of the government by Adams and Clay. In 
point of fact there has never been a cleaner adminis- 
tration in all our history than that of Quincy Adams, 



290 ANDREW JACKSON 

but nothing was too bad for Jackson to believe of 
these two men. It was quite Hke him to take all the 
campaign lies about them as literally true ; and when 
Tobias Watkins, the fourth auditor of the treasury, 
was found to be delinquent in his accounts, it was easy 
to suppose that many others were, in one way or 
another, just as bad. In his wholesale removals, 
Jackson doubtless supposed he was doing the country 
a service by " turning the rascals out." The imme- 
diate consequence of this demoralizing policy was a 
struggle for control of the patronage between Calhoun 
and Van Buren, who were rival aspirants for the suc- 
cession to the presidency. 

A curious affair now came in to influence Jackson's 
personal relations to these men. Early in 1829, John 
Eaton, Secretary of War, married a Mrs. Timberlake, 
with whose reputation gossip had been busy. It would 
seem that this ill repute was deserved, but Jackson 
was always slow to believe charges against a woman. 
His own wife, who had been outrageously maligned by 
the Whig newspapers during the campaign, had lately 
died. My venerable friend. Colonel Edward Butler, of 
St. Louis, the oldest living graduate of West Point, 
was Jackson's ward, and more familiar with his private 
life for forty years than any other man. He cherishes 
Jackson's memory with a feeling akin to idolatry, and 
I only wish I could begin to remember all the interest- 
ing things he has told me about him. They tried to 
keep newspaper lies from coming to Mrs. Jackson's 
ears, but of course in vain. Many a time Colonel 
Butler, coming suddenly into the room, would find the 
poor old lady sitting absorbed in grief, with her great 
quarto Bible in her lap and tears stealing down her 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 291 

cheeks. She was one of the best women that ever 
lived, says Colonel Butler, and there can be little doubt 
that she died of a broken heart. Whig editors had 
killed her as much as if they had taken guns and shot 
her. Soon after her death Mrs. Eaton came one day 
to the President, and throwing herself at his feet, told 
him with many sobs and tears how she was ill used and 
persecuted. Could nothing be done, she implored, to 
mend matters ? Jackson was haggard with grief, and 
fiercely vindictive. He knew that his wife had been 
wickedly slandered ; he took it for granted that the 
case must be the same with Mrs. Eaton. In this he 
was doubtless mistaken, but his letters on the subject 
are written in a noble temper and fully reveal the 
spirit which made him take Mrs. Eaton's part with 
more than his customary vehemence. Mrs. Calhoun 
and the wives of the secretaries would not recognize 
Mrs. Eaton. Mrs. Donelson, wife of the President's 
nephew, and now mistress of ceremonies at the White 
House, took a similar stand. Jackson scolded his 
secretaries and sent Mrs. Donelson home to Tennessee, 
but all in vain. He found that vanquishing Welling- 
ton's veterans was a light task compared with that of 
contending against the ladies in an affair of this sort. 
Foremost among those who frowned Mrs. Eaton out 
of society was Mrs. Calhoun. On the other hand, 
Van Buren, a widower, found himself able to be some- 
what more complaisant, and accordingly rose in Jack- 
son's esteem. The fires were fanned by Lewis and 
Kendall, who saw in Van Buren a more eligible ally 
than Calhoun. Presently intelligence was obtained 
from Crawford, who hated Calhoun, to the effect that 
the latter, as member of Monroe's cabinet, had disap- 



292 ANDREW JACKSON 

proved of Jackson's conduct in Florida. This was 
quite true, but Calhoun had discreetly yielded his 
judgment to that of the cabinet, led by Adams, and 
thus had oi^cially sanctioned Jackson's conduct. 
These facts, as handled by Eaton and Lewis, led Jack- 
son to suspect Calhoun of treacherous double-dealing, 
and the result was a quarrel which broke up the 
cabinet. In order to get Calhoun's friends, Ingham, 
Branch, and Berrien, out of the cabinet, the other 
secretaries began by resigning. This device did not 
succeed, and the ousting of the three secretaries en- 
tailed further quarrelling, in the course of which the 
Eaton affair and the Florida business were beaten 
threadbare in the newspapers and evoked sundry 
challenges to deadly combat.^ In the spring and 

^ Mrs. Lee to Colonel Gantt 

[Apropos of General Jackson's relations with Mrs. Eaton and Mr. Calhoun. The 
original letter from which these extracts are taken is dated Silver Spring, May 23, 
1889, and is preserved among Dr. Fiske's papers.] 

"... I shall relate chiefly what I heard when General Jackson visited 
my Parents or when his guest. I was eleven years old when I first met 
him, and twenty-three at our last parting. When my Parents removed 
from Kentucky to Washington my brothers did not accompany us, conse- 
quently I was more than ever their constant companion, being their only 
daughter, and Mother my teacher. . . . The first time I ever heard Mrs. 
Eaton's name mentioned was in a conversation between Mother and the 
President, where he spoke of the annoyance given him by Mrs. Donelson's 
reflisal to be civil to Mrs. Eaton when she called at the White House; he 
thought Mrs. Eaton, as the wife of his friend and a member of the Cabinet, 
ought to be politely received, but ' Emily ' is influenced by her husband 
who is under ' Calhoun's thraldom.' This was the purport of his complaint, 
and out of this domestic disagreement arose the gossip which was well 
known to have been kept up by Mrs. Eaton, who enjoyed notoriety even at 
the expense of her own reputation and of the truth. . . . Soon after 
Major and Mrs. Donelson went to Tennessee for a short time. I after- 
wards heard from my Parents that they repented of their position, and Mrs. 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 293 

summer of 183 1, the new cabinet was formed, consist- 
ing of Edward Livingston, Secretary of State ; Louis 

Eaton was received as a visitor, but to my positive conviction never to stay 
even for a day. . . . Nothing strikes me more in reviewing the past than 
the liberties taken with the General by those who formed his family circle, 
and the gentleness with which he submitted to impositions, especially of 
servants and children. But if it touched a point of duty he was firm, 
though always amiable and kind. ... I was frequently at the White 
House in childhood and as a young lady. ... I never met Mrs. Eaton 
there. When she went she did so as any other acquaintance, and from 
wha" I have heard was received with but scant courtesy by Mrs. Donelson. 
. . . The White House has never since been graced with a more beautiful, 
refined, gentle woman [Mrs. D.], — except perhaps she may have been 
excelled by Mrs. Cleveland, who had greater modern educational advan- 
tages and the rare gift of tact. ... I heard General Jackson comment but 
once on Mrs. Eaton . . . during my visit to the Hermitage in 1842. . . . 
"Mrs. Eaton's daughter, Virginia Timberlake, was my school-mate at 
Mm®. Sigoigne's ; she was a brilliant woman in mind, appearance, and 
accomplishments, who in spite of her want of veracity attracted me very 
much, but my mother forbade any intimacy as she did not approve of Miss 
Timberlake or visit Mrs. Eaton. But Virginia was so amusing that I fear 
I would have been very disobedient but for my dear friend and monitor, 
Isabella Cass, who had the same instructions from home, for I know that 
neither the Cass nor the Woodbury families, with whom I have had a life- 
long intimacy, visited Mrs. Eaton, though Judge Woodbury and Governor 
Cass were members of the Jackson Cabinet. After we left school, by hard 
begging, I sometimes got permission to go to see Virginia, which calls she 
never returned. Still when in trouble she would write for me to come to 
her. At that time, she was engaged to be married to Barton Key, to which 
both families objected bitterly. Mrs. Eaton's treatment of her daughter 
amounted to cruelty. Virginia escaped from some of it by deceiving her 
mother. I told the General of this episode. . . . He had always felt sorry 
for ' The Timberlake children,' knowing that their ' Mother's lack of truth 
would be fatal to them.' He had known their grandparents, the O'Neils, 
when he was Senator from Tennessee and Mrs. O'Neil had been very kind 
to his wife. Mrs. Jackson, when ill ; and General Jackson, when consulted 
by his ' friend Eaton ' about his marriage, advised him to marry 'the Widow 
Timberlake' and promised to stand by him. ... I am convinced, and 
with much reason, that Mme. Sampayo, alias Virginia Timberlake, has 
inspired these French romances about her mother and General Jackson : 
she disliked and spoke bitterly of both, and several times in the past thirty 
years, I have seen and heard of . . . different articles on this subject in 
Paris paper. She always changes her history and gets coarser as she grows 



2 94 ANDREW JACKSON 

McLane, Treasury ; Lewis Cass, War ; Levi Woodbury, 
Navy ; R. B. Taney, Attorney-general ; in post-office, 

older. I suppose she may need money, or craves notoriety which it may 
bring her. ... 

" When my Parents bought their home opposite the War Department it 
needed extensive repairs, and we went to live there before it was free from 
the smell of paint. The President when he called insisted that I stay at 
the White House (as the paint made me ill) until the odour was gone. I 
went, and it was quite six weeks before he and I thought it safe for me to 
return home. I never had a happier visit. He did smoke his pipe after 
dinner, and I have filled his fresh, clean clay pipes, with long cane stems, 
many times for him ; but he rarely used a pipe more than one day, and 
there was a bundle of canes brought along with the new pipes. ... I 
thus became informed about some very important matters. The removal 
of the Government funds from the Bank of the United States which was 
then in progress was one of them. The President sent several friends to 
New York to obtain reliable information from commercial monied men 
about banks or institutions to which it might be safe to transfer the 
Government Deposits. Mr. Kendall, from his letter, must have been one 
of them, and wrote in the most discouraging tone, to which the President 
replied ; and I either copied his letter or he dictated it, for I remember dis- 
tinctly that he warned Mr. Kendall not to be misled by the emissaries of 
Nicholas Biddle ('who is now a desperate man') and 'who is nagging the 
footsteps of every prominent official,' because nothing but the Public 
Deposit concealed the fact that Biddle's Bank was at that moment ' bank- 
rupt.' That was the year your class graduated at West Point. . . . 

" Blair mentioned to me that Mr. Fiske does not believe that General 
Jackson threatened to hang Mr. Calhoun. I think he is mistaken. . . . 
I am certain that the main import of the story was (as I heard it) true, — 
which was, upon the first ' overt act ' at Charleston, he would have Mr. 
Calhoun and the other leading Conspirators arrested and tried for treason, 
of which they would undoubtedly be found guilty, when he would hang 
every one of them. I heard Mr. Crittenden and Father talk about this 
matter ; both laughed very heartily at the way in which Governor Letcher 
described the effect on Mr. Calhoun of this threat, when Governor Letcher 
reported to him the conversation with General Jackson in which the threat 
was made, Governor Letcher saying to Mr. Calhoun that he came directly 
from the White House to inform him of his peril. In 1842, when at the 
Hermitage, General Jackson expressed his opinion to me very freely of Mr. 
Calhoun, whose intellect he said was of the highest order, but he knew him 
to be heartless, selfish, and a physical coward. Mr. Clay was his personal 
enemy and had done him wrongs Mr. Calhoun dared not do. but Mr. Clay 
was a brave man, and a patriot, who loved, and would have gladly given 
his life to serve his country." 



II 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 295 

no change. On Van Buren's resignation, Jackson at 
once appointed him minister to England, but there 
was a warm dispute in the Senate over his confirmation, 
and it was defeated at length by the casting vote of 
Calhoun. This check only strengthened Jackson's 
determination to have Van Buren for his successor in 
the presidency. The progress of this quarrel entailed 
a break in the " kitchen cabinet," in which Duff 
Green, editor of the Telegraph and friend of Calhoun, 
was thrown out. His place was taken by Francis 
Preston Blair of Kentucky, a man of eminent ability 
and earnest patriotism. To him and his sons, as 
energetic opponents of nullification and secession, 
our country owes a debt of gratitude which can 
hardly be overstated. Blair's indignant attitude 
toward nullification brought him at once into ear- 
nest sympathy with Jackson. In December, 1830, 
Blair began publishing the Globe, the organ hence- 
forth of Jackson's party. For a period of ten years, 
until the defeat of the Democrats in 1840, Blair 
and Kendall were the ruling spirits in the adminis- 
tration. Their policy was to reelect Jackson to the 
presidency in 1832, and make Van Buren his suc- 
cessor in 1836. 

During Jackson's administration there came about 
a new division of parties. The strict constructionists, 
opposing internal improvements, protective tariff, and 
national bank, retained the name of Democrats, which 
had long been applied to members of the old Republi- 
can party. The term Republican fell into disuse. The 
loose constructionists, under the lead of Clay, took the 
name of Whigs, as it suited their purposes to describe 
Jackson as a kind of tyrant; and they tried to dis- 



296 ANDREW JACKSON 

credit their antagonists by calling them Tories, but 
the device found little favour. On strict construc- 
tionist grounds Jackson in 1829 vetoed the bill for a 
government subscription to the stock of the Mays- 
ville turnpike in Kentucky; and two other similar 
bills he disposed of by a new method which the 
Whigs indignantly dubbed a "pocket veto." The 
struggle over the tariff was especially important as 
bringing out a clear expression of the doctrine of nul- 
lification on the part of South Carolina. Practically, 
however, nullification was first attempted by Georgia 
in the case of the disputes with the Cherokee Indians. 
Under treaties with the federal government these 
Indians occupied lands which were coveted by the 
white people. Adams had made himself very unpopu- 
lar in Georgia by resolutely defending the treaty 
rights of these Indians. Immediately upon Jackson's 
election the state government assumed jurisdiction 
over their lands, and proceeded to legislate for them, 
passing laws that discriminated against them. Dis- 
putes at once arose, in the course of which Georgia 
twice refused to obey the Supreme Court of the United 
States. At the request of the governor of Georgia, 
Jackson withdrew the federal troops from the Cherokee 
country and refused to enforce the rights which had 
been guaranteed to the Indians by the United States. 
His feelings toward Indians were those of a frontier 
fighter, and he asked, with telling force, whether an 
Eastern state, such as New York, would endure the 
nuisance of an independent Indian state within her 
own boundaries. In his sympathy with the people of 
Georgia on the particular question at issue, he seemed 
for the moment to be conniving at the dangerous prin- 



1 1 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 297 

ciple of nullification. These events were carefully 
noted by the politicians of South Carolina. The pro- 
tectionist policy which since the peace of 18 15 had 
been growing in favour at the North had culminated 
in 1828 in the so-called "tariff of abominations." 
This tariff, the result of a wild, helter-skelter scramble 
of rival interests, deserved its name on many accounts. 
It discriminated, with especial unfairness, against the 
Southern people, who were very naturally and properly 
enraged by it. A new tariff, passed in 1832, modified 
some of the most objectionable features of the old one, 
but still failed of justice to the Southerners. Jackson 
was opposed to the principle of protective tariffs, and 
from his course with Georgia it might be argued that he 
would not interfere with extreme measures on the part 
of the South. During the whole of Jackson's first term 
there was more or less vague talk about nullification. 
The subject had a way of obtruding itself upon all sorts 
of discussions, as in the famous debates on Foote's reso- 
lutions which lasted over five months in 1830 and called 
forth Webster's wonderful speech in reply to Hayne. 
A few weeks after this speech, at a public dinner in 
commemoration of Jefferson's birthday, after sundry 
regular toasts had seemed to indicate a drift of senti- 
ment in approval of nullification, Jackson suddenly 
arose with a volunteer toast, " Our Federal Union : it 
must be preserved." It was like a bombshell. Cal- 
houn was prompt to reply with a toast and speech in 
behalf of " Liberty, dearer than the Union," but the 
nullifiers were bitterly disappointed and chagrined. 
In spite of this warning. South Carolina held a con- 
vention November 19, 1832, and declared the tariffs 
of 1828 and 1832 to be null and void in South Caro- 



298 ANDREW JACKSON 

lina ; all state officers and jurors were required to take 
an oath of obedience to this edict; appeals to the 
federal Supreme Court were prohibited under penal- 
ties; and the federal government was warned that 
an attempt on its part to enforce the revenue laws 
would immediately provoke South Carolina to secede 
from the Union. The ordinance of nullification 
was to take effect on the ist of February, 1833, and 
preparations for war were begun at once. On the 
1 6th December the President issued a proclamation 
in which he declared that he should enforce the laws 
in spite of any and all resistance that might be 
made ; and he showed that he was in earnest by 
forthwith sending Lieutenant David Farragut with 
a naval force to Charleston harbour and ordering 
General Scott to have troops ready to enter South 
Carolina if necessary. In the proclamation, which 
was written by Livingston, the President thus de- 
fined his position : ^ " I consider the power to annul 
a law of the United States, assumed by one state, 
incompatible with the existence of the Union, con- 
tradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, 
unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every 
principle on which it was founded, and destructive of 
the great object for which it was formed." Governor 
Hayne of South Carolina issued a counter-proclama- 
tion, and a few days afterward Calhoun resigned the 
vice-presidency and was chosen to succeed Hayne in 
the senate. Jackson's resolute attitude was approved 

^Mrs. Elizabeth B. Lee in her letter to Colonel Gantt, quoted on 
pages 292-294, wrote, " My Father said to me that the Nullification Procla- 
mation as first drafted by General Jackson was a far more able paper 
than the polished substitute based on it and written by Mr. Livingston 
and adopted by the President." 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 299 

by public opinion throughout the country. By the 
Southern people generally the action of South Caro- 
lina was regarded as precipitate and unconstitutional. 
Even in that state a Union convention met at Colum- 
bia and announced its intention of supporting the 
President. In January Calhoun declared in the Sen- 
ate that his state was not hostile to the Union and had 
not meditated an armed resistance ; a " peaceable se- 
cession," to be accomplished by threats, was probably 
the ultimatum really contemplated. In spite of Jack- 
son's warning, the nullifiers were surprised by his 
unflinching attitude, and complained of it as inconsist- 
ent with his treatment of Georgia. When the first of 
February came the nullifiers deferred action. In the 
course of that month a bill for enforcing the tariff 
passed both houses of Congress, and at the same time 
Clay's compromise tariff was adopted, providing for the 
gradual reduction of the duties until 1842, after which 
all duties were to be kept at twenty per cent. This 
compromise was well-meant but pernicious, for it en- 
abled the nullifiers to claim a victory and retreat from 
their position with colours flying. Calhoun, indeed, 
afterward pointed to the issue of the contest as con- 
clusively proving the beneficent character of his theory 
of nullification. Here, he said, by merely threatening 
to nullify an obnoxious, and as he maintained uncon- 
stitutional, act of federal legislation. South Carolina 
had secured its repeal, and all was pleasant and peace- 
ful ! It was not Jackson, however, but Clay, that Cal- 
houn had to thank for the compromise, nor were the 
nullifiers by any means as well satisfied as he tried to 
believe. 

The nullifiers, indeed, had made a great mistake 



300 ANDREW JACKSON 

when they inferred from Jackson's attitude toward 
Georgia that they could count upon his aid or conni- 
vance in the case of South Carolina. The insubordi- 
nation of Georgia was shown in refusing to obey a 
decree of the Supreme Court, and Jackson had no 
fondness for the Supreme Court. He is said to have 
exclaimed, somewhat maliciously, "John Marshall has 
made his decision ; now let him enforce it ! " But the 
nullification act of South Carolina was a direct chal- 
lenge to the executive head of the United States gov- 
ernment. He could see its bearings in an instant, 
and it aroused all the combativeness that was in his 
nature. 

During this nullification controversy Jackson kept 
up the attacks upon the United States Bank which he 
had begun in his first annual message to Congress in 
1829. His antipathy to such a bank, in which the 
federal government was a shareholder and virtually to 
some extent a director, had been shown as long ago 
as Washington's administration, when the bank was 
first established. For two reasons it was especially 
obnoxious to the people of the South and the South- 
west, and to the Democratic party generally. In the 
first place, the question as to the constitutional author- 
ity of Congress to establish such an institution was 
preeminently the test question between strict con- 
structionists and loose constructionists. In the great 
fight between them it played the same part that Little 
Round Top played in the battle of Gettysburg. Once 
let the enemy carry that point and the whole field was 
lost. The contest over the assumption of state debts 
had faded out of sight before Jackson's presidency ; it 
had become what the Germans call an "■ iiberwundene 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 301 

standpunktr The contest over protective tariffs, on 
the other hand, had only lately become severe. But 
there the bank had been standing for nearly forty 
years, a perpetual menace to the theory of strict con- 
struction. President Madison had reluctantly signed 
the bill for its recharter in 18 16, apparently because 
he could think of no practical alternative. The new 
charter was to expire in 1836, and President Jackson, 
in his determination that it should not again be re- 
newed, was restrained by no such practical considera- 
tions. 

In the second place, the bank was hated as the most 
prominent visible symbol of Hamilton's plan for an 
alliance between the federal government and the mon- 
eyed classes of society. In this feeling there was no 
doubt something of the sheer prejudice which ignorant 
people are apt to entertain against capitalists and cor- 
porations. But the feeling was in the main whole- 
some. There was really very good reason for fearing 
that a great financial institution, so intimately related 
to the government, might be made a most formidable 
engine of political corruption. The final result of the 
struggle, in Tyler's presidency, showed that Jackson 
was supported by the sound common sense of the 
American people. 

Jackson's suggestions with reference to the bank 
in his first message met with little favour, especially as 
he coupled them with suggestions for the distribution 
of the surplus revenue among the states. He returned 
to the attack in his two following messages, until, in 
1832, the bank felt obliged in self-defence to apply, 
somewhat prematurely, for a renewal of its charter on 
the expiration of its term. Charges brought against 



302 ANDREW JACKSON 

the bank by Democratic representatives were investi- 
gated by a committee, which returned a majority report 
in favour of the bank. A minority report sustained 
the charges. After prolonged discussion the bill to 
renew the charter passed both houses and July lo, 
1832, was vetoed by the President. An attempt to 
pass the bill over the veto failed of the requisite two- 
thirds majority. 

Circumstances had already given a flavour of per- 
sonal contest to Jackson's assaults upon the bank. 
There was no man whom he hated so fiercely as Clay, 
who was at the same time his chief political rival. 
Clay made the mistake of forcing the bank question 
into the foreground, in the belief that it was an issue 
upon which he was likely to win in the coming presi- 
dential campaign. Clay's movement was an invitation 
to the people to defeat Jackson in order to save the 
bank ; and this naturally aroused all the combative- 
ness in Jackson's nature. His determined stand im- 
pressed upon the popular imagination the picture of a 
dauntless " tribune of the people " fighting against the 
"monster monopoly." Clay unwisely attacked the 
veto power of the President, and thus gave Benton an 
opportunity to defend it by analogies drawn from the 
veto power of the ancient Roman tribune, which in 
point of fact it does not at all resemble. The discus- 
sion helped Jackson more than Clay. It was also a 
mistake on the part of the Whig leader to risk the 
permanence of such an institution as the United 
States Bank upon the fortunes of a presidential cam- 
paign. It dragged the bank into politics in spite of 
itself, and by thus affording justification for the fears 
to which Jackson had appealed, played directly into 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 303 

his hands. In this campaign all the candidates were 
for the first time nominated in national conventions. 
There were three conventions, all held at Baltimore. 
In September, 183 1, the anti-masons nominated Will- 
iam Wirt of Virginia, in the hope of getting the 
National Republicans or Whigs to unite with them, 
but the latter, in December, nominated Clay. In the 
following March the Democrats nominated Jackson, 
with Van Buren for Vice-president. During the 
year 1832 the action of Congress and President, with 
regard to the bank charter, was virtually a part of the 
campaign. In the election South Carolina voted for 
candidates of her own, John Floyd of Virginia and 
Henry Lee of Massachusetts. There were 219 elec- 
toral votes for Jackson, 49 for Clay, 1 1 for Floyd, and 
7 for Wirt. Besides his own state. Clay carried Mary- 
land and Delaware, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and 
Massachusetts. All the rest of the country, including 
half of New England, went for Jackson. He inter- 
preted -this overwhelming victory as a popular con- 
demnation of the bank and approval of all his actions 
as President. The enthusiastic applause from all 
quarters which now greeted his rebuke of the nulli- 
fiers served still further to strengthen his belief in 
himself as a " saviour of society " and champion of 
" the people." Men were getting into a state of mind 
in which questions of public policy were no longer 
argued upon their merits, but all discussion was 
drowned in cheers for Jackson. Such a state of 
things was not calculated to check his natural vehe- 
mence and disposition to override all obstacles in 
carrying his point. He now felt it to be his sacred 
duty to demolish the bank. In his next message to 



304 ANDREW JACKSON 

Congress he created some alarm by expressing doubts 
as to the bank's solvency, and recommending an inves- 
tigation to see if the deposits of public money were 
safe. In some parts of the country there were indica- 
tions of a run upon the branches of the bank. The 
Committee on Ways and Means investigated the matter 
and reported the bank as safe and sound, but a minor- 
ity report threw doubt upon these conclusions, so that 
the public uneasiness was not allayed. The conclu- 
sions of the members of the committee, indeed, bore 
little reference to the evidence before them, and were 
determined purely by political partisanship. Jackson 
made up his mind that the deposits must be removed 
from the bank. The act of 1816, which created that 
institution, provided that the public funds might be 
removed from it by order of the Secretary of the 
Treasury, who must, however, inform Congress of his 
reasons for the removal. As Congress resolved, by 
heavy majorities, that the deposits were safe in the 
bank, the spring of 1833 was hardly a time when a Sec- 
retary of the Treasury would feel himself warranted, 
in accordance with the provisions of the act, to order 
their removal. Secretary McLane was accordingly 
unwilling to issue such an order. In what followed, 
Jackson had the zealous cooperation of Kendall and 
Blair. In May McLane was transferred to the State 
Department, and was succeeded in the treasury by 
W. J. Duane of Pennsylvania. The new secretary, 
however, was convinced that the removal was neither 
necessary nor wise, and in spite of the President's 
utmost efforts refused either to issue the order or to 
resign his office. In September, accordingly, Duane 
was removed and R. B. Taney of Maryland appointed 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 305 

in his place. Taney at once ordered that after the 
ist of October the public revenues should no longer 
be deposited with the national bank, but with sundry 
state banks, which soon came to be known as the " pet 
banks." Jackson alleged, as one chief reason for this 
proceeding, that if the bank were to continue to re- 
ceive public revenues on deposit, it would unscrupu- 
lously use them in buying up all the members of 
Congress, and thus securing an indefinite renewal of 
its charter. This, he thought, would be a death-blow 
to free government in America. His action caused 
intense excitement and some commercial distress, and 
prepared the way for further disturbance. In the 
next session of the Senate Clay introduced a resolu- 
tion of censure, which was carried after a debate which 
lasted all winter. It contained a declaration that the 
President had assumed " authority and power not 
conferred by the Constitution and laws, but in deroga- 
tion of both." Jackson protested against the resolu- 
tion, but the Senate refused to receive his protest. 
Many of his appointments were rejected by the Sen- 
ate, especially those of the directors of the bank and 
of Taney as Secretary of the Treasury. An attempt 
was made to curtail the President's appointing power. 
On the other hand, many of the President's friends 
declaimed against the Senate as an aristocratic insti- 
tution which ought to be abolished. Benton was 
Jackson's most powerful and steadfast ally in the Sen- 
ate. Benton was determined that the resolution of 
censure should be expunged from the records of that 
body, and his motion continued to be the subject of 
acrimonious debate for two years. The contest was 
carried into the state elections, and some senators 



306 ANDREW JACKSON 

resigned in consequence of instructions received from 
their state legislatures. At length, January i6, 1837, 
a few weeks before Jackson's retirement from office, 
Benton's persistency triumphed and the resolution of 
censure was expunged. It has been customary with 
Whig writers to laugh at Benton for this, and to call 
his conduct spiteful, boyish, and silly. It would be 
more instructive, however, to observe that his conduct 
was the natural outgrowth of the extreme theory of 
popular government which he held. He looked upon 
Jackson as a disinterested tribune of the people, who 
for carrying out the popular will and ridding the 
country of an exceedingly dangerous institution, at 
the cost of some slight disregard of red tape, had 
incurred unmerited censure ; and it seemed to him an 
important matter, and not a mere idle punctilio, that 
such a wrongful verdict should be reversed. There 
was a good deal of truth, as well as some error, in this 
view. If pushed to extremes it would result in un- 
bridled democracy, which in the hands of a powerful 
and unscrupulous leader is liable to pass into Cccsar- 
ism. Webster and the Whigs, in opposing this ex- 
treme view of popular government, in contending for 
the necessity of constitutional checks in such a coun- 
try as ours, and in blaming Jackson for his autocratic 
manner of overriding such checks, were quite right. 
At the same time there can be little doubt that Jack- 
son was purely disinterested, and that in this particu- 
lar case he did fully represent the will of the people 
in overthrowing a dangerous institution. The com- 
mercial panic which followed in 1837 was by most 
people attributed to his removal of the deposits. I 
shall endeavour to show, in my next lecture, on " Tip- 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 307 

pecanoe and Tyler too," that this notion was entirely 
incorrect, and the causes of the great panic lay much 
deeper than was supposed at the time. The belief 
that it was due to Jackson's policy was a chief cause 
of the Whig victory in 1840; but as soon as the im- 
mediate effects of the panic were over, there was a 
general acquiescence in the final death-blow dealt to the 
bank by President Tyler, and since then nobody has 
had the hardihood to ask that it should be restored. 

In foreign affairs Jackson's administration w^on great 
credit through its enforcement of the French spoliation 
claims. European nations which had claims for 
damages against France, on account of spoliations 
committed by French cruisers during the Napoleonic 
wars, had found no difficulty after the peace of 181 5 
in obtaining payment ; but the claims of the United 
States had been superciliously neglected. In 1831, 
after much fruitless negotiation, a treaty was made by 
which France agreed to pay the United States five 
million dollars in six annual instalments. The first 
payment was due Febuary 2, 1833. A draft for the 
amount was presented to the French minister of finance, 
and payment was refused on the ground that no appro- 
priation for that purpose had been made by the Cham- 
bers. Louis Philippe brought the matter before the 
Chambers, but no appropriation was made. Jackson 
was not the man to be trifled with in this way. In his 
message of December, 1834, he gravely recommended 
to Congress that a law be passed authorizing the cap- 
ture of French vessels enough to make up the amount 
due. The French government was enraged, and 
threatened war unless the President should apologize, 
— not a hopeful sort of demand to make of Andrew 



308 ANDREW JACKSON 

Jackson. Here Great Britain interposed with good 
advice to France, which led to the payment of the 
claim without further delay. The effect of Jackson's 
attitude was not lost upon European governments, 
while at home the hurrahs for " Old Hickory " were 
louder than ever. The days when foreign powers 
could safely insult us were evidently gone by. 

In the election of 1836 Jackson's wishes were ful- 
filled in the victory of Van Buren, with 1 70 electoral 
votes against 1 24 for all other candidates. The remain- 
der of Jackson's life was spent in his Tennessee home, , 
known as the Hermitage. About the time of his . 
election to the presidency the ugly wound received in 
the duel with Dickinson in 1806, which had never prop- • 
erly healed, broke out afresh and became more and I' 
more troublesome, until his most intimate friends were 
inclined to attribute to it his death, which occurred on 11 
the 3d of June, 1845. Throughout his extraordinary,' 
career he had been devoutly religious, and one cannot 1 
fully comprehend him without taking into account the 
element of the Puritan person thatwas so strong in him. 
There probably never lived a man more strictly conscien- 
tious, according to his own somewhat narrow lights, than I 
Andrew Jackson. Whether he ever felt moved to for-j 
give his enemies may be doubted, for it never occurred 
to him that he was not in the right. A contrite spirit 
he can hardly have had, but after all his warfare he 
sank peacefully to rest. His remarkable influence 
over the common people had not ceased with his 
presidency, and it survived his death until it ended in 
a kind of Barbarossa legend quite rare among such a 
people as ours. To this day, we are told, there is| 
some happy valley in western Pennsylvania, the precisei 

t 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 309 

locality of which is not too strictly indicated, where 
old men every fourth year, in the month of November, 
still hobble to the polls and drop into the ballot-box 
their loyal vote for Andrew Jackson ! 

The period of Jackson's presidency was one of 
the most remarkable in the history of the world, 
and nowhere more remarkable than in the United 
States. It was signalized by the introduction and 
rapid development of railroads, of ocean navigation, of 
agricultural machines, anthracite coal, and friction 
matches, of the modern type of daily newspaper, of 
the beginnings of such cities as Chicago, of the steady 
immigration from Europe, of the rise of the Abolition- 
ists and other reformers, and of the blooming of 
American literature, when, to the names of Bryant, 
Cooper, and Irving, were added those of Longfellow, 
Whittier, Prescott, Holmes, and Hawthorne. The 
rapid expansion of the country, and the extensive 
changes in ideas and modes of living, brought to the 
surface much crudeness of thought and action. As 
the typical popular hero of such a period, Andrew 
Jackson must always remain one of the most pictu- 
resque and interesting figures in American history. 
The crudeness of some of his methods, and the evils 
that have followed from some of his measures, are 
obvious enough, and have often been remarked upon. 
But when it is said that he was utterly ignorant of the 
true principles of statesmanship, and conducted him- 
self in his presidency like a bull in a china shop ; 
when it is urged that his election to the presidency 
was a thing to be lamented, and that we ought never 
to have had any kind of man for chief magistrate 
except the kind represented by our first six Presidents, 



3IO ANDREW JACKSON 

— one can hardly yield unqualified assent to such propo- 
sitions. It is a source of legitimate pride that we live 
in a country where a man may rise from the humblest 
origins to the most exalted position in which his fel- 
low-countrymen can place him. If it be true that mere 
chance may bring about such a rise of fortune, it is at 
least very seldom that such can be the case. Usually 
it must require such rare qualities of mind and char- 
acter, such richness of experience and such knowledge 
of men, as to be more than equivalent to a great deal 
that is conventionally classed as training and scholar- 
ship. No man in his senses will for a moment 
imagine that the scholarly Sumner could ever have 
performed the herculean task allotted to Abraham 
Lincoln. Now in the case of Andrew Jackson, while 
he was not versed in the history and philosophy of 
government, it is far from correct to say that there 
was nothing of the statesman about him. On the 
contrary, it may be maintained that in nearly all his 
most important public acts, except those that dealt 
with the civil service, Jackson was right. His theory 
of the situation was not reached by scientific methods, 
but it was sound, and it was much needed. Among 
the ablest books on government that have ever been 
written — books that ought to be carefully read and 
deeply pondered by every intelligent American man 
and woman — are the three works of Herbert Spencer, 
entitled " Social Statics," " The Study of Sociology," 
and " Man and the State." The theory of government 
set forth in these books is that of the most clear- 
headed and powerful thinker now living in the world, 
a man who, moreover, is thinking the thoughts of 
to-morrow as well as of to-day. In spirit it is most 



f 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 3 1 1 

profoundly American, but not in the sense in which 
that word was understood by Clay and the Whigs. 
It was Jackson whose sounder instincts prompted him 
to a course of action quite in harmony with the high- 
est political philosophy. During the administration 
of John Quincy Adams there was fast growing up a 
tendency toward the mollycoddling, old granny theory 
of government, according to which the ruling powers 
are to take care of the people, build their roads for 
them, do their banking for them, rob Peter to pay 
Paul for carrying on a losing business, and tinker and 
bemuddle things generally. It was, of course, beyond 
the power of any man to override a tendency of this 
sort, but Jackson did much to check it ; and still more 
would have come from his initiative if the questions of 
slavery and secession had not so soon come up to 
absorb men's minds and divert attention from every- 
thing else. The protective theory of government has 
too much life in it yet ; but without Jackson it would 
no doubt have been worse. His destruction of the 
bank was brought about in a way that one cannot 
wish to see often repeated ; but there can be little 
doubt that it has saved us from a great deal of trouble 
and danger. By this time the bank, if it had lasted, 
would probably have become a most formidable engine 
of corruption. 

Herein Jackson was powerfully prompted and aided 
by Van Buren, who stood in somewhat the same rela- 
tion to him as Hamilton to Washington. Unques- 
tionably Van Buren had a more philosophical and 
luminous view of the proper sphere and functions of 
government, in its relations to the people, than any 
other American statesman since Jefferson. The mantle 



312 ANDREW JACKSON 

of Jefferson fell upon Van Buren, and it was to Jack- 
son's credit that he took that statesman into his 
innermost counsels. The soldier- President, though 
doubtless at first actuated by personal motives, soon 
found the soundest kind of support. 

But it is upon his attitude toward the nullifiers that 
Jackson's most conspicuous claim to our gratitude is 
based. The question as to whether the federal Con- 
stitution created a nation or not was never really set- 
tled until it was settled by war. Previous to Jackson's 
presidency, people's ideas on the subject were very 
hazy, and when single states, or sections of the country, 
grumbled and threatened, nobody knew exactly what 
ought to be done about it. It was significant that 
Webster's great speech and Jackson's decisive action 
should have come so near together. Webster's speech 
was not only a most masterly summing up of the situ- 
ation, but for sublime eloquence we must go back to 
the time of Demosthenes to find its equal. Among the 
forces that have held the Union together, the intelli- 
gent response of the popular mind to that speech, and 
the strong emotions it awakened, must be assigned a 
very high place. But, after all, it was only Mr. Web- 
ster's speech ; it did not create a precedent for action ; 
it was something which a federal executive might see 
fit to follow, or might not. But from the moment 
when President Jackson said in substance to the nulli- 
fiers, " Gentlemen, if you attempt to put your scheme 
into practice, I shall consider it an act of war and shall 
treat it accordingly," from that moment there was no 
mistaking the significance of the action. It created a 
precedent which, in the hour of supreme danger, even 
the puzzled, reluctant, hesitating Buchanan could not 



i 



AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 313 

venture to disregard. The recollection of it had much 
to do with setting men's faces in the right direction in 
the early days of 1861 ; and those who lived through 
that doubting, anxious time will remember how people's 
thoughts went back to the grim, gaunt figure, long 
since at peace in the grave, and from many and many 
a mouth was heard the prayer, O for one hour of 
Andrew Jackson I 



^r I 



yy\ 



VIII 

HARRISON, TYLER 

AND THE WHIG COALITION 



VIII 
HARRISON, TYLER 

AND THE WHIG COALITION 

It would be hard to find in the whole field of history 
a subject more interesting in its details or more richly 
suggestive in its illustrations of broad philosophical 
principles than the development of political parties in 
the United States since the adoption of our federal 
Constitution. It is the story of the rapid expansion 
of principles and methods of government long prac- 
tised on a small scale in the townships of New Eng- 
land and the parishes and counties of the Southern 
states, until they have become adapted to the manage- 
ment of an imperial dominion extending from ocean 
to ocean. Population has grown with unexampled 
rapidity, the arts and sciences have achieved such con- 
quests as our grandfathers would have deemed incred- 
ible, the growing complexity of modern industry has 
quite changed the aspect of society, commercial prob- 
lems have taken on dimensions difficult to grasp, 
strangers from all parts of the earth come thronging 
in to share our advantages, while too often they need 
to be taught the very rudiments of our political 
methods, vast tracts of wilderness have been subdued, 
rude villages springing up on distant prairies change 
as by magic into noble cities, new states endowed with 
ample liberty of self-government are added to our 
federal commonwealth, till the constellation is about 

317 



3l8 HARRISON, TYLER 

to number more than forty stars; yet amid all this 
huge development of human activity the political 
structure reared a century ago has increased in elastic 
strength. In spite of all shortcomings, it has shown 
itself in grave emergencies equal to the situation, 
and it has fulfilled with supreme efficiency the first 
duty of government, the duty of preserving order and 
inspiring confidence. While it has once been called 
upon to deal with a convulsion as formidable as ever 
threatened the existence of a nation, its success in 
overcoming the evil has been such as to convince us 
more than ever of its invincible strength ; and our 
trust in it reaches sublimity when shown in the pro- 
found quiet which attends upon a presidential election 
in which eleven million votes are cast and the admin- 
istration of affairs passes from one party to another. 
People in the Old World often allude to American 
things as if bigness were their only noticeable attribute. 
But in the physical dimensions of the facts here cited 
there is deep moral significance. They furnish unim- 
peachable testimony to the essential soundness of Ameri- 
can political life, and justify us in looking forward with 
hope to the future. Without for a moment underrating 
the perils that beset us, or the serious obstacles to right 
living that are yet to be overcome, we feel that the 
success already achieved is such that we may confront 
these dangers and hindrances with cheerful courage. 
If the partisan view of American politics were cor- 
rect, no such sound development of national life would 
have been possible in this country. According to the 
partisan theory, which we may find daily expounded 
in the newspapers and which makes every fourth year 
the occasion for so much vapid rhetoric and so many 



AND THE WHIG COALITION 319 

shameless lies, — according to this theory, all the politi- 
cal intelligence, all the public virtue, all the patriotism, 
in the United States are confined to one-half of the 
people, while the other half are not only unintelligent 
and unscrupulous, but actuated by an unaccountable 
preference for foreign over American interests. Ac- 
cording to this theory American party strife is a phase 
of the everlasting struggle between Ormuzd and Ahri- 
man, and all means, fair or foul, must be called into 
requisition in order to suppress the evil spirit and 
keep him in outer darkness. Under the influence of 
such a theory men's consciences are often at election 
time reconciled to tricks which in more sober moments 
they would promptly condemn. Yet in the main the 
good sense of the American people has kept them 
from acting upon such a one-sided view of the case ; 
and it is for this reason that our political history has 
not been, like that of the old Italian republics, a dis- 
mal record of wholesale proscriptions and reversals of 
policy, culminating in the loss of authority on the part 
of the government and of liberty on the part of the 
citizens. To insure the stability of a civilized state, it 
is necessary that the liberty of individuals and the 
authority of the community should be alike sustained ; 
and to this end nature seems to have made provision 
that in a free society, where people's thoughts and 
wishes can find ready expression, a fair balance shall 
be preserved between the votes that would extend the 
powers of government and those that would limit 
them. Says the sentry in " lolanthe," 

" I often think it comical, 

How Nature always does contrive 
That every boy and every gal, 



,320 HARRISON, TYLER 

That's born into the world alive, 
Is either a little Liberal 

Or else a little Conservative." 

If we were to take a hint from mathematical physics 
we might regard this curious fact as a case under the 
general law of deviations from an average. Out of a 
thousand shots fired at a target the deviations in the 
one direction will very nearly counterbalance those in 
the other. So in a political society, where free aim 
can be taken toward the course of action most bene- 
ficial to the community, the distribution of opinions 
will be found to follow the same law. The line of 
average deviation will be swayed now a little to one 
side, now a little to the other, and the resultant course 
will be remarkably steady; it will express itself in 
what we call a conservative and moderate policy. 
For this reason there is no form of political society so 
strong, so peaceful, so adaptable, so likely to endure, 
as an intelligent democracy. It is repression that 
calls forth radicalism. It is in the unwholesome soil 
of despotism that anarchist weeds spring up. When 
the states general are not assembled for nearly two 
centuries, and class legislation meanwhile goes on 
briskly, it is time to look out for a reign of terror. 
In American history the revolutions which have 
been dreaded by many good people, when there has 
occurred a change of party supremacy, as in 1801, 
in 1829, and in 1885, have in general not happened. 
In the single instance in which a violent convulsion 
has resulted, in 1861, the exception was of the kind 
that proves the rule, for the trouble was caused by the 
existence of negro slavery, an institution utterly incom- 
patible with the spirit of true democracy. In the other 



AND THE WHIG COALITION 32 1 

instances moderation has prevailed for two reasons : 
first, the winning party has usually owed its victory to 
the transfer of relatively independent votes from the 
opposite party, and such transferred votes are likely to 
act as a potent conservative influence with the win- 
ning party ; secondly, there are certain instincts which 
govern the party in power as a responsible agent, 
and certain other instincts which govern the party 
in opposition as an irresponsible critic ; and when 
the party in opposition becomes the party in power, 
it passes under the sway of the former group of 
instincts, and any tendency to push matters to ex- 
tremes is thus powerfully checked. These points 
were illustrated in the administration of Jefferson. 
The Republican victory of 1800 was won partly by the 
aid of Federalist votes that in 1796 had been given to 
Adams. The strong Federalist measures of Hamil- 
ton had now been for several years in successful 
operation ; they had become part of our system of 
government, and to have laid violent hands upon them 
would have been to transfer thousands of votes back 
to the Federalists in 1804. Moreover, when Jeffer- 
son came to be responsible for the conduct of affairs, 
he could feel the usefulness of many features in the 
Federalist scheme which he had formerly opposed. 
As a Republican and a strict constructionist Jefferson 
had no right to double, and more than double, the area 
of the United States by the purchase of Louisiana. 
So we see him becoming a most hardy loose con- 
structionist for the occasion, and pushing the doctrine 
of " implied powers " to an extreme from which the 
Federalists shrink back in horror. For the next dozen 
years we see the Republician party absorbing and 



32 2 HARRISON, TYLER 

appropriating what was best in Federalism, and becom- 
ing more and more the national party, while the Fed- 
eralists, losing their hold upon the people, sink into the 
position of a sectional party and at length dwindle 
into a faction. First it was John Quincy Adams, 
prince and protagonist of mugwumps, who upheld 
Jefferson in the embargo; then it was Daniel Webster, 
who refused to lend countenance to the Hartford con- 
vention ; and so the great party of Washington and 
Hamilton went to pieces until, in 1820, the victors 
could afford to be magnanimous, and Rufus King was 
reelected to the United States Senate through the aid 
of Martin Van Buren. As Federalist candidate for 
the presidency in 1816, King had received the electoral 
votes of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware. In 
1820 there was no candidate to take the field against 
Monroe. In 1824 the four candidates were so-called 
Republicans. In 1828 the election of Jackson over 
Adams was the victory of the West over the East, of 
the backwoodsman over the Harvard professor, of the 
so-called " man of the people " over the so-called " aris- 
tocrat," rather than the victory of one definite and 
avowed scheme of public policy over another. Never- 
theless, by 1828, the old issues having disappeared, 
new issues had arisen, and were really, though perhaps 
not distinctly, involved in the election. The ad- 
ministration of Adams had raised such new issues. 
The rapid settlement of the Western country was re- 
vealing the urgent need of better means of com- 
munication. The genius of George Stephenson had 
already devised the means of dealing with such a 
problem, and private enterprise, laying thousands of 
miles of iron rails, was soon to supply the need most 



AND THE WHIG COALITION 323 

effectually. But meanwhile it was quite natural that 
President Adams should take his cue from the 
wonderful roads and bridges and aqueducts built by 
the ancient Romans with money raised by taxation, 
and insist that Americans might well do likewise and 
thus bring together the distant sections of their vast 
country. This was the policy of " internal improve- 
ments." The end aimed at was a broad, a national, a 
noble end. It was only the method of attaining it 
that was questionable. There were some who deemed 
it a method more in harmony with the political ideas 
of ancient Romans than with those of modern Amer- 
icans ; but before the question could be settled by 
political argument the immense capabilities of private 
enterprise had been so clearly demonstrated that, for 
the most part, the policy of " internal improvements " 
has had to stand upon the defensive. 

This was one of the leading issues raised during 
the administration of John Quincy Adams. Closely 
connected with it was the question of the tariff. 
Since the War of 181 2 had made it difficult to obtain 
manufactured goods from abroad, the scarcity had 
served as a stimulus to sundry American manufac- 
tures, and the protectionist theory had begun to make 
powerful converts, among them Henry Clay. Mr. 
Clay advocated the policy of raising by protective 
duties more revenue than was needed for the ordi- 
nary expenses of administration, in order that there 
might be a surplus to be spent in building roads and 
dredging rivers; and he recommended this policy to 
many people by baptizing it " the American system." 
Then there was the question as to the continuance 
of the national bank, in which the government was 



324 HARRISON, TYLER 

itself a stockholder. This did not become a burning 
question until late in Jackson's first term. The 
extent to which old Federalist ideas had been adopted 
or acquiesced in by the Republicans was well shown 
in the fact that the bill for rechartering the bank in 
1816 was signed by President Madison. But Mad- 
ison's acquiescence was largely due to the want of 
any definite alternative policy ; and there were many 
who regarded the bank rather as a temporary make- 
shift, to be endured for the moment, than as a 
beneficent institution to be fastened permanently 
upon the country. 

Upon these three great questions of internal im- 
provements, tariff, and bank, the all-embracing Re- 
publican party became divided between 1824 and 
1832. The followers of Adams and Clay came to 
be distinguished as National Republicans, and this 
title indicated their strong point. Their policy com- 
mended itself, not only to those who believed it to 
be economically sound, but to many more who felt it 
desirable that above all things the national govern- 
ment should be strong. Such people inherited the 
tendencies of the original Federalists. They were 
inclined to construe liberally the implied powers of 
the Constitution, because they felt that the govern- 
ment needed such implied powers, in order to ward 
off the dangers of nullification and secession which 
were then looming upon the horizon. This was the 
strong point of the National Republicans. It was 
this that gave them the powerful support of Mr. 
Webster, who was by no means blind to the economic 
unsoundness of the so-called American system. On 
the other hand, those who now began acting in 



AND THE WHIG COALITION 325 

opposition to the National Republicans at length 
accepted the name of Democrats, which had formerly- 
been applied to Jefferson's followers by their oppo- 
nents as a term of disparagement. In the days when 
Jefferson led the opposition, and the guillotine was 
at work in Paris, the word democracy seemed to 
smack of Jacobinism ; but in the days when Andrew 
Jackson stood for government by the people, it had 
a pleasant sound. The Democrats were right in 
thinking themselves the genuine followers of Jef- 
ferson, and they saw clearly the weak side of the 
National Republicans, whose doctrines of tariff, bank, 
and improvements opened the door for limitless job- 
bery and iniquitous class legislation, and might easily 
become fraught with serious danger to government 
by the people and for the people. 

The new division between parties in Jackson's first 
term was not accomplished in a moment. People 
did not at once array themselves in opposite ranks. 
There was doubt and hesitation. General principles 
were then, as now, complicated and obscured by 
real or fancied local interests. But by 1832 the 
Democrats had become solidly welded together into 
a party with a rational and well-defined policy, and 
with leaders of great ability and influence, as variously 
exemplified in Jackson, Benton, Van Buren, and 
Blair. They were opposed to the theory of paternal 
government which formulated itself in internal im- 
provements, tariff, and bank ; and in order to sustain 
their position, they were inclined to construe the 
Constitution strictly, and maintain that its implied 
powers did not extend so far as to justify such a 
theory. 



326 HARRISON, TYLER 

Our survey of the political situation in 1832 is 
however, not yet complete. We have not yet taken 
into the account the peculiar relations of the people 
of the Southern states toward the two new parties, as 
it was affected, whether directly or indirectly, whether 
avowedly or tacitly, by the existence of their peculiar 
institution, negro slavery. From the outset Southern 
politicians were quick in perceiving that the security 
of their system of slavery depended upon that inter- 
pretation of the Constitution which should restrict as 
far as possible the implied powers to be exercised by 
the federal government. Herein, as strict construc- 
tionists, they might seem to have been in harmony 
with the Jackson Democrats as against the National 
Republicans. But there was no such harmony. When 
South Carolina in 1832 flung into the political arena 
the gauntlet of nullification, she found Jackson and 
his Democrats even more stanch in defence of the 
Union than Clay and his National Republicans. At 
that supreme moment Daniel Webster, whose political 
existence was identified with defence of the Union, 
was in alliance with Jackson, while Clay was dally- 
ing and temporizing with Calhoun. In order to 
explain this we must take our start from the South, 
and see how the political situation in 1832 presented 
itself to the Southern people. We know what was the 
attitude of Calhoun and of South Carolina. They 
represented the impulse which thirty years later drove 
the Southern people into rebellion. But there was 
also in the Southern states a mass of political beliefs 
and sentiments which, without agreeing with Calhoun 
and with South Carolina, agreed still less with Jack- 
son and Webster and the North. If we would under- 



AND THE WHIG COALITION 327 

stand the course of events that led to the overthrow of 
the Democrats in 1840, we must look for a moment 
into the history of this current of Southern opinion 
that was loath to go with Calhoun, but felt itself in 
honour bound to make protest against coercion as 
threatened by President Jackson. It was the same 
current of opinion and sentiment that in 1861 was 
loath to go with Jefferson Davis, but felt itself in 
honour bound to resist coercion as exercised by 
President Lincoln. There was much of this feeling 
in the South, and it was especially strong in the 
border states. It would never take the lead in a 
movement toward secession, but might easily be 
driven into such a movement as a choice between 
conflicting alternatives. Nowhere was this feeling 
stronger than in Virginia, and in no public man 
was it more completely exemplified than in John 
Tyler, tenth President of the United States. For 
studying the sources and the growth of this feeling, 
there is no better text-book than the " Letters and 
Times of the Tylers," — two stout octavos published 
at Richmond in 1884 and 1885, edited by one of the 
President's younger sons, Mr. Lyon Gardiner Tyler, 
president of William and Mary College. This inter- 
esting book gives us a sketch of the political history 
of the United States for a hundred years, as viewed by 
the intelligent and public-spirited members of one 
of the leading families of Virginia. The elder John 
Tyler, born in 1747, was associated with Madison in 
1785 in the resolution which secured a conference of 
delegates at Annapolis in the following year, and thus 
led the way toward the federal Convention. When 
the federal Constitution was laid before the people, 



328 HARRISON, TYLER 

however, Mr. Tyler was one of those who thought 
that it encroached too much upon state rights, and 
in the state convention of 1788 he was conspicuous 
among the opponents of ratification. He was one 
of those, moreover, who believed that the assent of 
Virginia to the Constitution could not have been 
secured but for the belief of many of the delegates 
that the right of the state to withdraw peaceably from 
the Union, in case it should ever see fit to do so, was 
not really surrendered. F'or the twenty years from 
1788 to 1808 Mr. Tyler was judge of the general 
court of Virginia, from 1808 to 181 1 he was gov- 
ernor of Virginia, and from 181 1 until his death in 
181 3 he was judge of the United States district court 
for Virginia. His son, the future President, was born 
at the homestead at Greenway, on the 29th of March, 
1 790. In early boyhood he attended the small school 
kept by a Mr. McMurdo, who was so diligent in his 
use of the birch that in later years President Tyler 
said " it was a wonder he did not whip all the sense 
out of his scholars." At the age of eleven young 
Tyler was one of the ringleaders in a rebellion in 
which the despotic McMurdo was overpowered by 
numbers, tied hand and foot, and left locked up in 
the schoolhouse until late at night, when a passing 
traveller effected an entrance and released him. On 
complaining to Judge Tyler, the indignant school- 
master was met with the apt reply, " Sic semper ty- 
rannis !'' The future President was graduated at 
William and Mary in 1807. At college he showed 
a strong interest in ancient history. He was also 
fond of poetry and music, and, like Thomas Jeffer- 
son, was a skilful performer on the violin. In 1809 



AND THE WHIG COALITION 329 

he was admitted to the bar, and had already begun 
to obtain a good practice when he was elected to the 
legislature, and took his seat in that body in Decem- 
ber, 181 1. He was here a firm supporter of Mr. 
Madison's administration, and the war with Great 
Britain, which soon followed, afforded him an oppor- 
tunity to become conspicuous as a forcible and per- 
suasive orator. One of his earliest public acts is 
especially interesting in view of the famous struggle 
with the Whigs, which in later years he conducted 
as President. The charter of the first bank of the 
United States, established in 1791, was to expire in 
twenty years, and in 181 1 the question of renewing 
the charter came before Congress. The bank was 
very unpopular in Virginia, and the assembly of that 
state, by a vote of 125 to 35, instructed its senators 
at Washington, Richard Brent and William E. Giles, 
to vote against a recharter. The instructions de- 
nounced the bank as an institution, in the founding 
of which Congress had exceeded its powers and 
grossly violated state rights. Yet there were many 
in Congress who, without approving the principle 
upon which the bank was founded, thought the eve 
of war an inopportune season for making a radical 
change in the financial system of the nation. Of 
the two Virginia senators. Brent voted in favour of 
the recharter, and Giles spoke on the same side, 
and although, in obedience to instructions, he voted 
contrary to his own opinion, he did so under pro- 
test. On January 14, 181 2, Mr. Tyler, in the Vir- 
ginia legislature, introduced resolutions of censure, 
in which the senators were taken to task, while the 
Virginia doctrines, as to the unconstitutional char- 



330 HARRISON, TYLER 

acter of the bank and the binding force of instruc- 
tions, were formally asserted. 

Mr. Tyler was reelected to the legislature annually, 
until in November, 1816, he was chosen to fill a va- 
cancy in the United States House of Representatives. 
In the regular election to the next Congress, out of 
two hundred votes given in his native county, he re- 
ceived all but one. As a member of Congress he soon 
made himself conspicuous as the most rigid of strict 
constructionists. When Mr. Calhoun introduced his 
bill in favour of internal improvements, Mr. Tyler voted 
against it. He also voted against the proposal for a 
national bankrupt act. He condemned, as arbitrary 
and insubordinate, the course of General Jackson in 
Florida, and contributed an able speech to the long 
debate over the question as to censuring that gallant 
commander. He was a member of a committee for 
inquiring into the affairs of the national bank, and his 
most elaborate speech was in favour of Mr. Trimble's 
motion to issue a scire facias against that institution. 
On all these points Mr. Tyler's course seems to have 
pleased his constituents ; in the spring election of 18 19 
he did not consider it necessary to issue the usual cir- 
cular address, or in any way to engage in a personal 
canvass. He simply distributed copies of his speech 
against the bank, and was reelected to Congress 
unanimously. 

The most important question that came before 
the sixteenth Congress related to the admission of 
Missouri to the Union. In the debates over this 
question, Mr. Tyler took extreme ground against the 
imposition of any restrictions upon the extension of 
slavery. At the same time he declared himself on 



AND THE WHIG COALITION 33 1 

principle opposed to the perpetuation of slavery, and 
he sought to reconcile these positions by the argument 
that in diffusing the slave population over a wide area 
the evils of the institution would be diminished and 
the prospects of ultimate emancipation increased. 
" Slavery," said he, " has been represented on all hands 
as a dark cloud, and the candour of the gentleman 
from Massachusetts (Mr. Whitman) drove him to the 
admission that it would be well to disperse this cloud. 
In this sentiment I entirely concur with him. How 
can you otherwise disarm it? Will you suffer it to 
increase in its darkness over one particular portion of 
this land, till its horrors shall burst upon it ? Will you 
permit the lightnings of its wrath to break upon the 
South, when by the interposition of a wise system of 
legislation you may reduce it to a summer's cloud ? " 
New York and Pennsylvania, he argued, had been 
able to emancipate their slaves only because they were 
so few. Dispersion, moreover, would be likely to 
ameliorate the condition of the black man, for by 
making his labour scarce in each particular locality, it 
would increase the demand for it, and would thus 
make it the interest of the master to deal fairly and 
generously with his slaves. To the obvious objection 
that the increase of the slave population would fully 
keep up with its territorial expansion, he replied by 
denying that such would be the case. His next argu- 
ment was that if an old state, such as Virginia, could 
have slaves, while a new state, such as Missouri, was 
to be prevented by federal authority from having them, 
then the old and new states would at once be placed 
upon a different footing, which was contrary to the 
spirit of the Constitution. If Congress could thus 



332 HARRISON, TYLER 

impose one restriction upon a state, where was the 
exercise of such a power to end ? Once grant such a 
power, and what was to prevent a slaveholding ma- 
jority in Congress from forcing slavery upon some 
territory where it was not wanted ? Mr. Tyler pursued 
the argument so far as to deny " that Congress, under 
its constitutional authority to establish rules and regu- 
lations for the territories, had any control whatever 
over slavery in the territorial domain." He was un- 
questionably foremost among the members of Congress 
in occupying this extreme position. When the 
Missouri Compromise bill was adopted by a vote of 1 34 
to 42, all but 5 of the nays were from the South, and 
from Virginia alone there were 1 7, of which Mr. Tyler's 
vote was one. The Richmond Enquirer of March 7, 
1820, in denouncing the compromise, observed, in 
language of prophetic interest, that the Southern and 
Western representatives now " owe it to themselves to 
keep their eyes firmly fixed on Texas ; if we are cooped 
up on the north, we must have elbow-room to the 
west." 

Mr. Tyler's further action in this Congress related 
chiefly to the question of a protective tariff, of which 
he was an unflinching opponent. In 182 1, finding 
his health seriously impaired, he declined a reelection, 
and returned to private life. His retirement, however, 
was of short duration, for in 1823 he was again elected 
to the Virginia legislature. Here, as a friend to the 
candidacy of Mr. Crawford for the presidency, he dis- 
approved the attacks upon the congressional caucus 
begun by the legislature of Tennessee in the interests 
of Andrew Jackson. The next year he was nominated 
to fill a vacancy in the United States Senate, but 



I 



AND THE WHIG COALITION 333 

Littleton Tazewell was elected over him. He opposed 
an attempt which was made about this time to remove 
William and Mary College to Richmond, and was 
afterward made successively rector and chancellor of 
the college, which prospered signally under his 
management. In December, 1825, he was chosen by 
the legislature to the governorship of Virginia, and in 
the following year he was reelected by a unanimous 
vote. As the strict constructionists were now becom- 
ing gradually united in opposition to the policy of 
President Adams, many members of Crawford's party, 
under the lead of John Randolph, went to swell the 
ranks of the Jacksonians, while others, among whom 
Mr. Tyler was one of the most distinguished, main- 
tained a certain independence in opposition. It is to 
be set down to Mr. Tyler's credit that he never attached 
any importance to the malicious story, believed by so 
many Jacksonians, of a corrupt bargain between 
Adams and Clay. A slander of somewhat similar 
character was soon to be aimed at himself. Soon after 
the meeting of the Virginia legislature, in December, 
1826, the friends of Clay and Adams combined with 
the members of the opposite party who could no 
longer endure Randolph's crazy freaks, and thus Gov- 
ernor Tyler was elected to the United States Senate 
by the narrow majority of 115 votes to no. Some 
indiscreet friends of Jackson now sought to show that 
there must have been some secret and reprehensible 
understanding between Tyler and Clay, but the at- 
tempt failed utterly. It is very interesting, however, 
to observe that Tyler owed his seat in the Senate to 
the followers of the man with whom he was hereafter 
to enter into such an extraordinary alliance. 



334 HARRISON, TYLER 

In the Senate Mr. Tyler took a conspicuous stand 
against the so-called "tariff of abominations," which 
even Benton and Van Buren, who were not yet in 1828 
quite clear as to their proper attitude, were induced to 
support. There was thus some ground for Tyler's 
opinion, expressed at this time, that the Jacksonians 
were not really orthodox defenders of strict construc- 
tion. It was on the occasion of Jackson's famous veto 
of the Maysville turnpike bill. May 27, 1830, that 
this most rigorous stickler for constitutional propriety 
found himself for the moment drawn toward the Presi- 
dent. It was quite proper and characteristic for him 
to attack the irregularity of Jackson's appointment of 
commissioners to negotiate a commercial treaty with 
Turkey, without duly informing the Senate ; but at the 
same time he showed good will toward the President 
by voting in favour of confirming the appointment of 
Van Buren as minister to Great Britain. In the presi- 
dential election of 1832 he supported Jackson, but only 
as a less objectionable candidate than Clay, Wirt, or 
Floyd. The preference accorded to Jackson over 
Floyd would indicate that the President's immortal 
Union toast had not seriously alarmed Mr. Tyler, who 
disapproved of nullification and condemned the course 
of South Carolina as rash and ill-considered. Herein 
Tyler was wiser than Calhoun. On the question of the 
tariff the South had really a strong case, and to throw 
the gauntlet of nullification into the arena was simply 
to offer the chances of victory to the North. But when 
it came to suppressing nullification with the strong 
hand, Mr. Tyler's attitude was curiously significant. 
He was emphatic in his opposition to President Jack- 
son's proclamation. He denounced it as a "tremen- 



AND THE WHIG COALITION 335 

dous engine of federalism," tending toward the " con- 
solidation " of the states into a single political body. 
His attitude in 1833 was substantially the same as in 
1 86 1, when secession had become a grim reality. In the 
earlier crisis, as in the later, he tried to stand upon the 
ground that while secession might be wrong, coercion 
was a greater wrong. This was the mental attitude 
that in 1861 led Virginia to join the Southern Confed- 
eracy and made Mr. Tyler in the last year of his life a 
member of the Confederate Congress. And as in 186^ 
the secession of Virginia was preceded by the assem- 
bling of a peace convention of border states, with Tyler 
for its president, so now in 1833 he undertook to play 
the part of mediator between Clay and Calhoun, and 
in that capacity earnestly supported the compromise 
tariff bill introduced by the former in the Senate on 
the 12th of February. In this measure, which was op- 
posed by Mr. Webster as an ill-timed and mischievous 
concession to the threats of South Carolina, we may 
see a premonitory symptom of that alliance between 
the followers of Tyler and Clay which soon resulted 
in the formation of the Whig party. At the same time 
occurred the sudden and decisive break between Tyler 
and Jackson. In a special message to Congress, the 
President asked for full and explicit authority to use 
the army and navy, if need be, for the purpose of 
suppressing armed insurrection. Congress readily re- 
sponded with the so-called " Force Bill," and here Mr. 
Tyler showed that he had the courage of his convic- 
tions. When the bill was put to vote in the Senate, on 
the 20th of February, some of its Southern opponents 
were conveniently absent, others got up and went out 
in order to avoid putting themselves on record. The 



336 HARRISON, TYLER 

vote, as then taken, stood : Yeas, thirty-two ; Nay, one, 
to wit, John Tyler. 

It was thus on the question of the right of the fed- 
eral government to use force in suppressing nullifica- 
tion that the Southern strict constructionists discovered 
that there was no room for them within the Democratic 
party as then constituted under the lead of Jackson, 
Van Buren, Benton, and Blair. In this conclusion 
the peculiar features of Jackson's attack upon the 
United States Bank only confirmed them. When it 
came to the removal of the deposits, Mr. Tyler's break 
with the administration was thorough and final. As 
we have seen, he was no friend to the bank ; he had 
fought against it on every fitting occasion, since the 
beginning of his public career. And now, in 1834, he 
declared emphatically, " I believe the bank to be the 
original sin against the Constitution, which, in the 
progress of our history, has called into existence a 
numerous progeny of usurpations. Shall I permit 
this serpent, however bright its scales or erect its 
mien, to exist by and through my vote } " Neverthe- 
less, strongly as he disapproved of the bank, Mr. Tyler 
disapproved still more strongly of the methods by 
which President Jackson assailed it. There seemed 
at that time to be growing up in the United States a 
spirit of extreme unbridled democracy quite foreign 
to the spirit in which our constitutional government, 
with its carefully arranged checks and limitations, was 
founded. It was a spirit that prompted mere majori- 
ties to insist upon having their way, even at the cost 
of overriding all constitutional checks and limits. 
This wild spirit possessed many members of Jack- 
son's party, and it found expression in what Mr. Ben- 



AND THE WHIG COALITION 33/ 

ton grotesquely called the ''''demos AV^/^o " principle. 
A good illustration of it was to be seen in Benton's 
argument, after the election of 1824, that Jackson, 
having received a plurality of electoral votes, ought to 
be declared President, and that the House of Repre- 
sentatives, in choosing Adams, was really "defying 
the will of the people." In similar wise President 
Jackson, after his triumphant reelection in 1832, was 
inclined to interpret his huge majorities as mean- 
ing that the people were ready to uphold him in any 
course that he might see fit to pursue. This feeling 
no doubt strengthened him in his determined attitude 
toward the nullifiers, and it certainly contributed to 
his arbitrary and overbearing method of dealing with 
the bank, culminating, in 1833, in his removal of the 
deposits. There was ground for maintaining that in 
this act the President exceeded his powers, and it 
seemed to illustrate the tendency of unbridled democ- 
racy toward practical despotism, under the leadership 
of a headstrong and popular chief. Mr. Tyler saw in 
it such a tendency, and he believed that the only safe- 
guard for constitutional government, whether against 
the arbitrariness of Jackson or the latitudinarianism 
of the Whigs, lay in a most rigid adherence to strict 
constructionist doctrines. Accordingly, in his speech 
of the 24th of February, 1834, he proposed to go 
directly to the root of the matter and submit the ques- 
tion of a national bank to the people in the shape of 
a constitutional amendment, either expressly forbid- 
ding or expressly allowing Congress to create such an 
institution. According to his own account, he found 
Clay and Webster ready to cooperate with him in this 
course, while Calhoun held aloof. Nothing came of 



338 HARRISON, TYLER 

the project ; but it was now easy to see the alliance 
fast maturing between the Northern National Repub- 
licans and those Southerners who agreed with Tyler. 
In December, 1834, as member of a committee for in- 
vestigating the management of the bank, Mr. Tyler 
brought in an elaborate report which seems to have 
been a very fair statement of the case. It did not sus- 
tain Jackson's charges of mismanagement, and was 
accordingly attacked by Benton as a partisan defence 
of the bank. This doubtless served to confuse the 
minds of people as to Tyler's real attitude. Before 
the smoke of the battle had cleared away, people 
would not distinguish between disapproval of Jack- 
son's methods and approval of the bank ; they would 
consider the one as equivalent to the other, and so 
they did. An incident which occurred the next year 
served to confirm this view. On Mr. Clay's famous 
resolution to censure the President for the removal of 
the deposits, Tyler had voted, along with Webster, in 
the affirmative. While Benton's resolutions for ex- 
punging the vote of censure were before the Senate, 
the Democratic legislature of Virginia instructed the 
two senators from that state to vote in the affirmative. 
As to the binding force of such instructions Mr. Tyler 
had long ago, in the case of Giles and Brent above 
mentioned, placed himself unmistakably upon record. 
His colleague, Benjamin Watkins Leigh, was known 
to entertain similar views. On receiving the instruc- 
tions, both senators refused to obey them. Both voted 
against the expunging resolution, but Leigh kept his 
seat, while the rigidly consistent Tyler resigned and 
went home. The result of this for Leigh was to be 
retirement to private life ; for Tyler it was to be eleva- 
tion to the presidency 



AND THE WHIG COALITION 339 

He had already been recommended for the vice- 
presidency by the legislatures of several Southern 
states. During the year 1834 the Whig party came 
into existence. At the North the National Republicans, 
the party of Clay and Webster, were beginning to 
call themselves Whigs ; while the Southern strict con- 
structionists gladly took the name of *' State Rights 
Whigs." Between these two wings of the new party 
there was no bond of union whatever except their 
common hostility to the Jackson Democrats. Their 
alliance was as unnatural as that of Fox and North 
against Lord Shelburne in 1783, or as that of John 
Bright with Lord Salisbury against Mr. Gladstone 
scarcely a decade ago. The protective theory of govern- 
ment, with its tariff, bank, and internal improvements, 
which was the fetich of the Northern Whigs, was to the 
Southern Whigs a device of Belial. Even in their com- 
mon hatred of Jackson they did not stand upon common 
ground ; for the Northern Whigs hated him for his 
stanch opposition to paternal government, while the 
Southern Whigs hated him for the severity with which 
he frowned upon nullification. The nearest approach 
to real sympathy between the two discordant allies 
was furnished by Tyler and Webster, in so far as 
they were agreed for the moment in condemning the 
violence of Jackson's proceedings in the particular 
case of the bank. And it was in this one point of 
sympathy that the name " Whig " had its origin. 
They called themselves Whigs because they saw fit 
to represent Jackson as a sort of unconstitutional 
tyrant, like George III., and for a moment they tried 
to stigmatize Jackson's followers as " Tories," but 
this device was unsuccessful. 



340 HARRISON, TYLER 

The alliance was so unnatural that it took some 
time to complete it. In 1836 there was no agreement 
upon a candidate for the presidency. The " State 
Rights" Whigs nominated Hugh Lawson White of 
Tennessee for President, and John Tyler for Vice- 
president. The Northern Whigs, in the hope of 
gathering votes from as many quarters as possible, 
thought it best to put forward some more colourless 
candidate than their real leader, Mr. Clay, and ac- 
cordingly they nominated General William Henry 
Harrison. This gentleman was born in Berkeley, 
Virginia, February 9, 1773. His father, Benjamin 
Harrison, was one of the signers of the Declaration 
of Independence, was twice elected governor of Vir- 
ginia, and in the state convention of 1788 was allied 
with the elder Tyler in opposing the adoption of the 
federal Constitution. William Henry Harrison was 
educated at Hampden Sidney College, Virginia, but 
broke off his studies in 1791 to take a commission 
in the army on the Western frontier, commanded by 
Anthony Wayne. Having distinguished himself for 
gallantry and for executive ability, he was in 1800 
appointed superintendent of Indian affairs and gov- 
ernor of the Indiana territory, comprising the present 
states of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. 
He held that office for several years, and when the 
Indian War broke out prematurely, in 181 1, he de- 
feated Tecumseh's brother, the Prophet, on the 7th 
of November of that year, in a bloody and decisive 
battle at Tippecanoe, on the upper Wabash. In the 
autumn of 181 2 he was appointed to the chief com- 
mand of the United States forces in the Northwest, 
and on October 5, 181 3, he won the battle of the 






M 



AND THE WHIG COALITION 34 1 

Thames over the allied British and Indians com- 
manded by General Proctor and Tecumseh. This 
battle, in which Tecumseh was killed and nearly the 
whole British force surrendered, was decisive of the 
war in the Northwest, and the two victories gave 
General Harrison a military reputation second only 
to Jackson's. In 18 16-18 19 he was a member of 
Congress. In 18 19 he was chosen to the senate of 
Ohio, and in 1822 was again a candidate for Congress, 
but was defeated because of his vote against the 
admission of Missouri to the Union as a free state. 
In 1824 he was chosen to the United States Senate, 
in 1828 President Adams sent him out as minister 
to the United States of Colombia, and in the follow- 
ing year he was recalled by President Jackson, and 
retired to his farm at North Bend, near Cincinnati. 
He was a good soldier and a thoroughly upright and 
trustworthy man. Upon the political questions that 
were dividing Whigs from Democrats in 1836, he had 
done little or nothing to commit himself, and in nomi- 
nating him for the presidency the Whigs sought to 
turn to their own uses the same kind of popular 
enthusiasm by which Jackson had profited. But the 
ill-organized opposition had no chance of winning a 
victory over the solid Democratic column. Many 
votes were thrown away. South Carolina, still fight- 
ing her own battle, voted for Person Mangum, a 
State Rights Whig. Massachusetts voted for Daniel 
Webster. Mr. White obtained the 1 1 votes of Georgia 
and the 15 of Tennessee, for the latter state, in spite 
of her reverence for Jackson, did not approve his 
policy of coercion and could not be induced to sup- 
port Van Buren. General Harrison carried Vermont, 



342 HARRISON, TYLER 

New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Ohio, 
and Indiana, — in all "j^^ votes. The opposition had 
hoped that, with so many candidates in the field, 
there would be enough bolting and scattering to 
prevent a choice by the people, and throw the election 
into the House of Representatives. But Mr. Van 
Buren won an easy victory. He received 1 70 electoral 
votes, a majority of 46 over the other candidates taken 
together. The result of the canvass for the vice- 
presidency was curious. Colonel Richard Johnson, 
the Democratic candidate, obtained exactly half the 
number of votes in the electoral college, so that there 
was no choice. For the only time in our history the 
election devolved upon the Senate, which proceeded 
to choose Colonel Johnson. What more especially 
concerns us here is the vote for Mr. Tyler. He 
failed to carry his own state, for Virginia was now 
firmly Democratic, and remained so until i860; but 
he ran ahead of his fellow-candidate, Mr. White, and, 
besides Tennessee and Georgia, he received the votes 
of Maryland and South Carolina. 

The result of this election left Mr. Tyler for the next 
two years in retirement, but one opinion of his, very 
clearly pronounced at this time, is worth quoting as 
an illustration of the independence of judgment which 
he sometimes manifested. The followers of Calhoun 
were bringing forward in Congress what was known 
as the " gag resolution " against all petitions and mo- 
tions relating in any way to the abolition of slavery. 
Mr. Tyler condemned this measure as impolitic on the 
part of the slaveholders, because it yoked together the 
question as to the right of petition and the question 
as to slavery, and thus, by presenting the slave power 



AND THE WHIG COALITION 343 

as hostile to free speech, gave a distinct moral advan- 
tage to the Abolitionists. The spirit of slavery, how- 
ever, was true to its own barbarous instincts when it 
rejected this prudent counsel. 

In the spring of 1838 Mr. Tyler was returned to 
the Virginia legislature, and in the following winter 
his friends put him forward for reelection to the United 
States Senate. In the memorable contest that ensued, 
in which William Rives was his principal competitor, 
the result was a complete deadlock, so that the legis- 
lature adjourned without making a choice. 

Meanwhile the financial crisis of 1837 — the most 
severe that has ever been known in this country — had 
wrecked the administration of President Van Buren. 
It was believed at the time that this frightful tempest 
in the commercial world was wholly or chiefly due to 
Jackson's assaults upon the United States Bank, and 
this opinion has been so confidently stated as a fact, 
and so often reiterated, that it has come to be one of 
the commonplaces of history. Yet, like many other 
commonplace assertions in history, it is only partially 
true. The causes of the panic of 1837 lay deeper than 
any acts of any administration. The seeds of distress 
had been so plentifully sown that an abundant crop 
must have been garnered about that time, no matter 
whether a Whig or a Democrat were occupant of the 
White House, no matter whether the public funds were 
deposited in one great bank or in fifty small ones. 
Since 1820 the increase of the country in wealth and 
population, and the rapidity of expansion westward, 
had been wonderful. Tennessee had nearly doubled 
in population, Ohio had more than doubled, Indiana 
had more than trebled, Mississippi had increased four- 



344 HARRISON, TYLER 

fold, Missouri fivefold, Illinois sevenfold, Michigan 
twentyfold. A transformation was going on in the 
cities. In 1820 New York and Philadelphia, with 
populations a little over 100,000, had hardly ceased to 
look like country towns ; by 1835 the former had passed 
250,000 and the latter 200,000, so that they were begin- 
ning to take on the appearance of large cities. In 1820 
the national debt was ^90,000,000; by 1835 every 
cent of it was paid and there was a surplus in the 
treasury, a fact which powerfully impressed people's 
imaginations, both here and in Europe. This pros- 
perity was the cause of endless self-glorification, and 
it was apt to be ascribed to American institutions in 
a greater degree than to the natural resources of the 
country. It began to seem as if nothing were impos- 
sible to American enterprise, and confidence grew into 1 
recklessness. It was an era of road-building. In 1 
1820 it cost $88 to carry a ton of freight from Buffalo 1 
to Albany; in 1825 the Erie Canal was finished, and I 
that ton could be carried that distance for $21.50; 
in 1835 it could be carried for $6.50. That single fact I 
gave an unprecedented stimulus to the growth alike of t 
New York and of the West. In 1830 there were 23 
miles of railroad in the United States; in 1836 there 
were 1273 miles. During the same six years the 
steamboat tonnage on our Western rivers increased 
nearly sixfold, and the cotton crop in the Southwestern 
states was doubled, while the price of raw cotton rose 
from ten to twenty cents a pound. Such sudden and 
surprising changes quite disturbed people's conceptions 
of value and bewildered them in their calculations. 
The great West began to seem an El Dorado, and 
so long as desired land was in some new region, it 



AND THE WHIG COALITION 345 

acquired an imaginary value, without much reference 
to its real relations to the development of the country, 
which, of course, time alone could disclose. The valu- 
ation of real estate in Mobile in 1831 was little more 
than a million dollars; in 1837 it was more than 27 
millions; in 1846 it had shrunk to less than 9 millions. 
Assuming that the increase from a million in 1831 to 
nearly 9 millions in 1846 represents real growth, we 
may regard the greater part of the intervening figure of 
27 millions as representing the heated fancies of men 
in the Atlantic states and in Europe anxious to invest 
their money where it could make them suddenly rich. 
The extent of the mania in Europe was indicated by 
the striking fact that although between 1830 and 1837 
we bought from foreign countries $140,000,000 worth 
of merchandise in excess of what we sold to them, we 
received from them at the same time $45,000,000 in 
specie in excess of what we paid to them. The ac- 
count was balanced by the shares taken by European 
capitalists in American enterprises. 

This rage for speculation led to immense purchases 
of Western public lands. At that time any one who 
chose could buy these lands at the fixed price of $1.25 
per acre, whether he intended to settle upon them or 
not. Speculators began buying extensive tracts in 
order to sell them at a greatly advanced price. Be- 
tween 1820 and 1829 the annual sales of public lands 
by the United States government averaged about 
$1,300,000. Between 1830 and 1834 they averaged 
from 3 to 5 millions. In 1835 they leaped up to 15 
millions, and in 1836 to 25 millions. The money 
spent in buying these remote unimproved lands, and 
in taking stock in railroads projected for reaching 



346 HARRISON, TYLER 

them, was thus abstracted from the ordinary and safe 
occupations of industry and commerce. There was a 
great demand for ready money, and in the prevaiHng 
spirit of boundless confidence it was met by an enor- 
mous increase of banks and bank credits. Between 
1830 and 1836 the banking capital of the United 
States rose from 60 to 250 millions, the loans and dis- 
counts from 200 to 450 millions, and the note circula- 
tion from 60 to 140 millions. Thus the elements of a 
prodigious commercial crisis were all at hand. There 
was the wholesale dealing in property that had only 
fictitious values ; there was the wholesale creation of 
indebtedness, and the attempt to pay it, Micawber- 
like, with paper promises to pay. Perhaps :;ackson's 
withdrawal of the government deposits from the 
United States Bank, and distribution of them among 
fifty state banks, may have helped to increase the mania 
for speculation ; but it is now apparent that the madness 
was already beyond control and fast hurrying to a crisis. 

A far wprse measure, for which both parties in Con- 
gress were responsible, and which Jackson ought to 
have vetoed, was the distribution of the surplus. The 
extinction of the national debt came to diminish the 
outgo just as the great sales of public lands came to 
swell the income; and so in 1836 there was a surplus 
of $37,000,000, which Congress decided to divide 
among the states and pay over in four quarterly instal- 
ments, beginning on New Year's of 1837. The pros- 
pect of this largess simply added to the general craze. 

By the summer of 1836 the bubble had been blown 
to such dimensions as perhaps had not been seen since 
the celebrated South Sea bubble of 1720. To prick 
and explode such airy nothings, it is only necessary 



AND THE WHIG COALITION 347 

that a few purchasers should begin to awake to their 
delusion and a few creditors should begin to ask for 
hard cash. By 1836 there were others than Martin 
Chuzzlewit who had learned to their cost that Alad- 
din's lamp was not to be found in malarial swamps on 
the Mississippi. Just then there was a creditor who 
made demands, and that creditor was the United 
States government. On the i ith of July the Secretary 
of the Treasury issued the famous "specie circular," 
requiring payments for public lands to be made in 
specie. Stringency of the money market had already 
begun to be felt, because the issue of paper had not 
kept pace with the feverish demand. Now the strin- 
gency increased with fearful rapidity. The crash 
began to come when the first quarter of the surplus 
was paid out by the deposit banks in January. So 
large a sum of money could not be moved without 
calling in loans and awakening apprehension. West- 
ern banks began calling for specie to pay their debts 
to the government; confidence died out in Europe, 
and gold began flowing thither to balance accounts. 
Prices had become so inflated, and money so hard to 
get, that mobs in the city of New York shouted for 
cheap food, and with true mob logic proceeded to de- 
stroy a great flour warehouse by way of making flour 
cheaper. In the course of the spring there was a col- 
lapse of prices and a collapse of credit. All over the 
country the banks suspended payment; great houses 
md little houses became alike insolvent ; widows and 
orphans who had taken stock in railroads leading to 
Eden were reduced to live upon charity ; coin disap- 
peared, and there was a partial return to barter ; a pair 
)f shoes would be paid for in soup tickets or chips 



34^ HARRISON, TYLER 

receivable for drinks of whiskey; in some places men 
found it hard to get work on any terms. 

Such in its main outlines was the crisis of 1837. A 
masterly account of it may be found in Shepard's "Van 
Buren," a little book which seems to me the ablest in 
all that excellent series of American Statesmen. We 
have had greater, more brilliant, more interesting 
Presidents than Mr. Van Buren ; but we have never 
had one with a more thorough grasp of the principles 
of political economy, or a more adequate and lucid 
conception of the proper sphere and duties of govern- 
ment. When Mr. Shepard calls his m.essage to Con- 
gress on the occasion of the panic one of the greatest 
of American state papers, his words are not at all too 
strong. It was natural that the President should be 
made the scapegoat for the sins of the people. The 
Whigs had predicted mischief from the overthrow of 
the national bank. People now attributed the panic 
to that cause and to the issue of the specie circular. 
The mischief, they said, was the work of government, : 
and now government must cure it. A few strokes of < 
President Jackson's pen had wrought all the evil, and 
it must be undone by a few strokes from President 
Van Buren's. A new bank must be chartered, the 
specie circular rescinded, and plenty of paper issued. 
If Van Buren had yielded to this popular clamour, the 
crisis would very likely have proved as obstinate as 
that of 1873, the length of which can plainly be traced 
to inconvertible paper. In commerce as in medicine, 
acute mania is easier to deal with than chronic melan- |ig 
cholia. Van Buren understood that the disease was ^ 
not one which government could cure, and he set this 
forth with admirable courage and force in his message if 



I 



AND THE WHIG COALITION 349 

So far from advocating a recharter of the bank, he led 
in the estabHshment of the present subtreasury system, 
by which the government is completely divorced from 
banking. This was the great achievement of his 
administration. But the Whigs had naturally taken 
advantage of the troubles to raise a cry for paternal 
government, and for the moment they found willing 
listeners everywhere. There was a general revolt 
against the hard-hearted administration which had 
done nothing to relieve the distress of the people. 
For the single purpose of defeating Mr. Van Buren, all 
differences of po'icy were subordinated. In the Whig 
convention at Harrisburg, which met on the 4th of 
December, 1839, almost a year before the election, no 
platform of principles was adopted. The unformu- 
lated platform was, " Anything to beat Van Buren." ^ 
It was now the turn of the Whigs to appeal to the 
frontier prejudices of the West against the aristocratic 
East by renominating General Harrison, who in the 
days of Tecumseh and Tippecanoe had lived in a log 
cabin and had on his table none of your French cham- 
pagne, but good hard cider. Naturally Mr. Tyler, as 
a leader of the Southern or State Rights Whigs, was 
nominated for the vice-presidency. In the uproarious 
campaign that followed there was less appeal to sober 
reason and a more prodigal use of claptrap than in any 
other presidential contest in our history. The chief 

^A newspaper clipping, preserved by Dr. Fiske, commenting on the 
heavy shower that fell upon " Bunker Hill Day," tells of a more notable 
shower that drenched the procession of September 17th, 1840, "the big- 
gest procession up to that date seen in Boston," wetting the Whigs, the 
correspondent says, " from one end of the line to the other " ; but Stephen 
C. Phillips went into Faneuil Hall the same night and gave the sentiment, 
"Any rain but the reign of Van Buren." 



350 HARRISON, TYLER 

features were long processions in which log cabins 
mounted on wheels were dragged about and kegs of 
hard cider were broached, while in stump speeches the 
heartless Van Buren was accused of having a silver ser- 
vice on his table and otherwise aping British manners. 
A kind of lilliburlero was sung, with its chorus : — 

" For Tippecanoe and Tyler too — Tippecanoe and Tyler too ; 
And with them we'll beat Uttle Van, Van. 
Van is a used-up man ; 
And with them we'll beat little Van." 

Thus borne upon a wave of popular excitement, 
" Tippecanoe and Tyler too " were carried to the White 
House. There were 234 electoral votes for Harrison 
and 60 for Van Buren. But a glance at the figures 
of the popular vote shows that then, as always in 
American politics, the approach to equilibrium was 
too close for a party to presume too much upon the tri- 
umph of the moment. Harrison's vote was 1,275,016; 
Van Buren's was 1,129,102; and there was a third 
candidate, James Birney, who obtained only about 
7000 votes, and carried no state. He stood for the 
abolition of negro slavery, and at that moment counted 
for little. 

The inauguration of the new government in March, 
1 84 1, brought with it some surprises. Perhaps the 
only distinct pledge to the people during the clamorous 
canvass had been the promise of civil service reform. 
That promise had been definite enough to inauce some 
Democrats to vote for the Whig candidates, but it 
now appeared that the Whig idea of reform agreed 
substantially with Jackson's; it was summed up in 
" turning the rascals out." The pressure of office- 



AND THE WHIG COALITION 35 1 

seekers at the White House was so great that some 
good people thought the worry and turmoil enough to 
account for President Harrison's death. However that 
may be, the true cause was pneumonia. He died on 
the 4th of April, just one month after his inaugura- 
tion, without having had time to indicate his policy. 
Among the Northern Whigs, however, there was little 
doubt as to what that policy ought to be. Mr. Clay 
was their real leader, and they regarded General Har- 
rison as a mere figurehead candidate, selected for what 
is called, in political slang, availability. Doubtless most 
people at the North who voted for Harrison did so in 
the belief that his election meant the victory of Clay's 
theory of government in the reestablishment of the 
national bank and the increase of tariff duties. Mr. 
Clay's own course, immediately after the inauguration, 
showed so plainly that he regarded the election as his 
own victory, that General Harrison felt called upon 
to administer a rebuke. " You seem to forget, sir," 
said he, "that it is I who am President." Harrison 
offered Clay the Secretaryship of State, and when Clay 
refused it because he preferred to stay in the Senate, 
it was given to Daniel Webster. 

But whatever President Harrison's policy might 
have been, there could be no doubt that his sudden 
death, in raising Mr. Tyler to the presidency, created 
an unlooked-for situation, which was likely to rob 
Mr, Clay and his friends of the fruits of their victory. 
It has been the habit of Whig writers to speak of 
Mr. Tyler as a renegade, and to slur over the circum- 
stances of his candidacy by declaring that at the time 
of his nomination his views on public questions, and 
in particular on the bank, were little known. But the 



352 HARRISON, TYLER 

sketch of his career here given is enough to show that 
there was no man in the United States in 1840 whose 
opinions had been more clearly or more boldly de- 
clared ; and if the Whigs had sinned in nominating 
him, they certainly had sinned with their eyes open. 
In the ill-yoked alliance of which the Whig party was 
born, the elements of a fierce quarrel were scarcely 
concealed, and the removal of President Harrison was 
all that was needed to kindle the flames of strife. 
"Tyler dares not resist," said Clay; "I'll drive him 
before me." On the other hand, the new President 
declared, " I pray you to believe that my back is to the 
wall, and that, while I shall deplore the assaults, I 
shall, if practicable, beat back the assailants ; " and he 
was as good as his word. Congress met in extra ses- 
sion. May 31, 1 84 1, the Senate standing 28 Whigs to 
22 Democrats, the House 133 Whigs to 108 Demo- 
crats. In his opening message President Tyler briefly 
recounted the recent history of the United States Bank, 
the subtreasury system, and other financial schemes, 
and ended with the significant words, " I shall be ready 
to concur with you in the adoption of such system 
as you may propose, reserving to myself the ultimate 
power of rejecting any measure which may, in my view 
of it, conflict with the Constitution, or otherwise jeop- 
ard the prosperity of the country ; a power which I 
could not part with, even if I would, but which I will 
not believe any act of yours will call into requisition." 
The challenge was promptly accepted by Congress. 
The ground was cleared for action by a bill for abol- 
ishing Van Buren's subtreasury system, which passed 
both houses and was signed by the President. But 
an amendment offered by Mr. Clay for the repeal of 



AND THE WHIG COALITION 353 

the law of 1836 regulating the deposits in the state 
banks was defeated by the votes of a small party, led by 
William C. Rives. The great question then came up. 
On constitutional grounds, Mr. Tyler's objection to 
the United States Bank had always been that Con- 
gress had no power to create such a corporation within 
the limits of a state without the consent of the state, 
ascertained beforehand. He did not deny, however, 
the power of Congress to establish a district bank for 
the District of Columbia, and, provided the several 
states should consent, there seemed to be no reason 
why this district bank should not set up its branch 
offices all over the country. Mr. Clay's so-called " fis- 
cal bank" bill of 1841 did not make proper provision 
for securing the assent of the states, and on that ground 
Mr. Rives proposed an amendment, substituting a 
clause of a bill suggested by Thomas Ewing, Secretary 
of the Treasury, to the effect that such assent should 
be formally secured. Mr. Rives's amendment was 
supported not only by several so-called " State Rights 
Whigs," but also by Senators Richard H. Bayard and 
Rufus Choate, and other friends of Mr. Webster. If 
adopted, its effect would have been conciliatory, and it 
might perhaps have averted for a moment the rupture 
between the ill-yoked allies. The Democrats, well 
aware of this, voted against the amendment, and it was 
lost. The bill incorporating the Fiscal Bank of the 
United States was then passed by both houses, and 
on the 1 6th of August was vetoed by the President. 
An attempt to pass the bill over the veto failed of 
the requisite two-thirds majority. 

The Whig leaders had already shown a disposi- 
tion to entrap the President. Before the passage of 



354 HARRISON, TYLER 

Mr. Clay's bill, John Minor Botts was sent to the White 
House with a private suggestion for a compromise. 
Mr. Tyler refused to listen to the suggestion except 
with the understanding that, should it meet with his 
disapproval, he should not hear from it again. The 
suggestion turned out to be a proposal that Congress 
should authorize the establishment of branches of the 
district bank in any state of which the legislature at 
its very next session should not expressly refuse its 
consent to any such proceeding; and that, moreover, 
in case the interests of the public should seem to 
require it, even such express refusal might be disre- 
garded and overridden. By this means the obnoxious 
institution might first be established in the Whig 
states, and then forced upon the Democratic states 
in spite of themselves. The President indignantly 
rejected the suggestion as " a contemptible subterfuge, 
behind which he would not skulk." The device 
nevertheless became incorporated in Mr. Clay's bill, 
and an impression got abroad that it was put there in 
order to smooth the way for the President to adopt the 
measure, but that in his unreasonable obstinacy he 
refused to avail himself of the opportunity. After his 
veto of August 1 6 these tortuous methods were 
renewed. Messengers went to and fro between the 
President and members of his cabinet on the one hand 
and leading Whig members of Congress on the other, 
conditional assurances were translated into the indica- 
tive mood, whispered messages were magnified and 
distorted, and presently appeared upon the scene an 
outline of a bill that it was assumed the President 
would sign. This new measure was known as the 
" fiscal corporation " bill. Like the fiscal bank bill, it 



AND THE WHIG COALITION 355 

created a bank in the District of Columbia, with 
branches throughout the states, and it made no proper 
provision for the consent of the states. The President 
had admitted that a "fiscal agency" of the United 
States government, established in Washington for the 
purpose of collecting, keeping, and disbursing the 
public revenue, was desirable if not indispensable ; a 
regular bank of discount, engaged in commercial trans- 
actions throughout the states, and having the United 
States government as its principal shareholder and 
federal officers exerting a controlling influence upon 
its directorship, was an entirely different affair, some- 
thing in his opinion neither desirable nor permissible. 
In the " fiscal corporation " bill an attempt was made 
to hoodwink the President and the public by a pretence 
of forbidding discounts and loans, and limiting the 
operations of the fiscal agency exclusively to exchanges. 
While this project was maturing, the Whig newspapers 
fulminated with threats against the President in case 
he should persist in his course ; private letters warned 
him of plots to assassinate him ; and Mr. Clay in the 
Senate referred to his resignation in 1836, and asked 
why, if constitutional scruples again hindered him 
from obeying the will of the people, did he not now 
resign his lofty position and leave it for those who 
could be more compliant ? To this it was aptly replied 
by Mr. Rives that "the President was an independent 
branch of the government as well as Congress, and was 
not called upon to resign because he differed in opinion 
with them." Some of the Whigs seem really to have 
hoped that such a storm could be raised as would 
browbeat the President into resigning, whereby the 
government would be temporarily left in the hands of 



356 HARRISON, TYLER 

William L. Southard, then president/r^ tempore of the 
Senate. But Mr. Tyler was neither to be hoodwinked 
nor bullied. The " fiscal corporation " bill was passed 
by the Senate on Saturday, September 4, 1841 ; on 
Thursday, the 9th, the President's veto message was 
received ; on Saturday, the i ith, Thomas Ewing, 
Secretary of the Treasury, John Bell, Secretary of War, 
George E. Badger, Secretary of the Navy, John J. 
Crittenden, Attorney-general, and Francis Granger, 
Postmaster-general, resigned their places. The adjourn- 
ment of Congress had been fixed for Monday, the 13th, 
and it was hoped that, suddenly confronted by a unani- 
mous resignation of the cabinet and confused by want 
of time in which to appoint a new cabinet, the Presi- 
dent would give up the game. But the resignation 
was not unanimous, for Daniel Webster, Secretary of 
State, remained at his post ; and on Monday morning 
the President offered to the Senate for confirmation the 
names of Walter Forward of Pennsylvania for Secre- 
tary of the Treasury; John McLean of Ohio for 
Secretary of War, Abel P. Upshur of Virginia for 
Secretary of the Navy, Hugh S. Legare of South 
Carolina for Attorney-general, and Charles A. Wick- 
liffe of Kentucky for Postmaster-general. These ex- 
cellent appointments were duly confirmed. 

Whether the defection of Mr. Webster at this 
moment would have been so fatal to the President as 
some of the Whigs were inclined to believe may well 
be doubted ; but there can be no doubt that his adhe- 
rence to the President was of great value. By remain- 
ing in the cabinet Mr. Webster showed himself too 
clear-sighted to contribute to a victory of which the 
whole profit would be reaped by his rival, Mr. Clay ; 



AND THE WHIG COALITION 357 

and the President was glad to retain his hold upon so 
strong an element in the North as that which Mr. 
Webster represented. Some of the leading Whig 
members of Congress now issued addresses to the 
people, in which they loudly condemned the conduct 
of the President and declared that " all political connec- 
tion between them and John Tyler was at an end from 
that day forth." It was open war between the two 
departments of government. Only a few members of 
Congress, commonly known as " the corporal's guard," 
really recognized Mr. Tyler as their leader; but the 
Democratic members came to his support as an ally 
against the Whigs. The state elections of 1841 
showed some symptoms of a reaction in favour of the 
President's views, for in general the Whigs lost ground 
in them. As the spectre of the crisis of 1837 faded 
away in the distance, the people began to recover from 
the sudden and overmastering impulse that had swept 
the country in 1840, and the popular enthusiasm for 
the bank soon died away. Mr. Tyler had really won 
a victory of the first magnitude, as was conclusively 
shown in 1844, when the presidential platform of the 
Whigs was careful to make no allusion whatever to 
the bank. On this crucial question the doctrines of 
paternal government had received a crushing and per- 
manent defeat. In the next session of Congress the 
strife with the President was renewed, but it was now 
tariff, not bank, that furnished the subject of discus- 
sion. The lowering of duties by the compromise 
tariff of 1833 had now diminished the revenue until 
it was insufficient to meet the expenses of government. 
The Whigs accordingly carried through Congress a 
bill continuing the protective duties of 1833, ^^^ P^^" 



358 HARRISON, TYLER 

viding that the surplus revenue, which was thus sure 
soon to accumulate, should be distributed among the 
states. But the compromise act of 1833, in which Mr. 
Tyler had played an important part, had provided that 
the protective policy should come to an end in 1842. 
Both on this ground, and because of the provisions 
for distributing the surplus, the President vetoed the 
new bill. Congress then devised and passed another 
bill, providing for a tariff " for revenue, with incidental 
protection," but still contemplating a distribution of 
the surplus if there should be any. The President 
vetoed this bill. Congress received the veto message 
with indignation, and on the motion of John Quincy 
Adams it was referred to a committee, which con- 
demned it as an unwarrantable assumption of power, 
and after a caustic summary of Mr. Tyler's acts since 
his accession to office, concluded with a reference to 
impeachment. This report called forth from the Pres- 
ident a formal protest; but the victory was already 
his. The Whigs were afraid to go before the country 
in the autumn elections with the tariff question unset- 
tled, and the bill was accordingly passed by both houses 
without the distributing clause, and was at once signed 
by the President. As a parting menace, the distribut- 
ing clause was then passed in a separate bill, but a 
" pocket veto " sufficed to dispose of it. Congress 
adjourned August 31, 1842, and in the autumn elections 
the Whig majority of 25 in the House of Representa- 
tives gave place to a Democratic majority of 61. 

Here our story must for the present stop, with the 
total overthrow of the Whig doctrines of paternal gov- 
ernment. As the net result of twenty years of politi- 
cal experience, since the election of John Quincy 



AND THE WHIG COALITION 359 

Adams had raised new political issues, we find the 
Whig theory everywhere discomfited. The bank was 
too completely dead to find any mourners. The pro- 
tective tariff was reduced to such a point that we were 
abreast with England in the march toward free trade, 
and our foreign commerce was beginning to rival that 
of England, when the Civil War and its war taxes set 
us back for a while. At the same time the policy of 
internal improvements remained, as it still remains, on 
the defensive. Viewed in its large relations, it was a 
noble victory for the sound Democratic doctrine of 
" government of the people, by the people, and for the 
people." The four eminent men who represented this 
doctrine were Jackson, Van Buren, Benton, and Blair. 
They also stood for the Union, against all separatist 
schemes, as strongly and devotedly as Webster and 
Clay. As for Tyler, while we cannot call him a 
great man, while for breadth of view and sound grasp 
of fundamental principles he is immeasurably below 
Van Buren, at the same time he is not so trivial a 
personage as his detractors would have us believe. 
He was honest and courageous, and in the defeat of 
Mr. Clay's theory of government he played an impor- 
tant and useful part. If he is small as compared with 
Jackson and Van Buren, he is great as compared with 
Pierce and Buchanan. 

We cannot here consider the close of Mr. Tyler's 
presidency, because that would introduce a new set of 
considerations, and our time is now at an end. When 
the question of the annexation of Texas came into the 
foreground, the lines were speedily drawn between 
North and South, as they had not been drawn since 
1820. Mr. Tyler and his State Rights Whigs had 



36o HARRISON, TYLER 

already broken with the Northern Whigs. Now on the 
Texas question they aUied themselves with the Demo- 
crats, thus following Calhoun, who had already, in 1838, 
after Jackson was out of the way, thought it safest to 
ally himself with that party. It was natural that all 
those who wished to defer the solution of the slavery 
question should sooner or later come to join the party 
that construed the Constitution as it had been con- 
strued by the elder Tyler and the elder Harrison in 
the convention of 1788. It was this that took the 
Tyler men over to the Democrats in 1844. In thus 
going over, they altered for the worse the character 
of the Democratic party. In 1844 Mr. Var^: Buren 
would naturally have been the Democratic candidate 
for the presidency, but because he bravely opposed the 
annexation of Texas as a reenforcement to the slave 
power, he was unable to secure the nomination. This 
was because Mr. Tyler's State Rights Whigs had joined 
the Democrats. As Lord Dundreary would say, the 
tail had now become able to wag the dog. From 
1844 the Democratic party, led by Mr. Polk, the first 
" dark horse," came to be more and more a Southern 
party. The Northern Whigs, having seen all their 
economic principles defeated by Mr. Tyler, soon came 
to have nothing in common save the disposition to 
save the Union by concessions to the South ; and on 
this plan of campaign they met with their final defeat 
in 1852. At the same time the Democrats became 
more and more dependent upon Southern support as 
they lost their Northern leaders. In 1848 we see Mr. 
Van Buren a candidate for the presidency upon a 
free-soil platform. By 1856 we see Benton dubious 
and Blair a Republican. Between 1850 and i860 



AND THE WHIG COALITION 36 1 

many of the best and most vigorous elements in the 
old Democratic party of Jackson and Van Buren had 
gone over to the new Republican party ; just as since 
1876 we have seen many of the most characteristic 
elements of the old Republican party of Lincoln and 
Sumner going over to the Democrats. Whatever may 
be the merits of the Republican party of to-day, it is 
no more the party of Lincoln and Sumner than the 
Federalist party of 181 2 was the party of Hamilton 
and John Adams. Just so with the Democratic party 
forty years ago. By the subtraction of its original 
leaders, the Democratic party of Pierce and Buchanan 
came to be something quite different from the Demo- 
cratic party of Jackson and Van Buren. It came to 
be a mere servant of the slave power. The danger 
which menaces the Republican party to-day is the 
danger that it may fall under the control of monopo- 
lists. Should it turn out to be so, the history of 
American politics points to the probable result. That 
history shows with clearness how moderately the evo- 
lution of society goes on where the popular will finds 
unhampered expression. When political parties go in 
quest of strange gods we cast them forth into outer 
, darkness, and go on our way rejoicing. It is well that 
I this is so, for so long as this can be done, we may be 
. sure that we are a free people. 



IX 

DANIEL WEBSTER 
AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 



IX 

DANIEL WEBSTER 

AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 

When the little town of Hampton, on the coast be- 
tween the Merrimac and Piscataqua rivers, was settled 
in 1639 by Antinomians who had found cold welcome 
at Boston, among the company was one Thomas Web- 
ster, concerning whom little is known. A hundred 
years later we find his family living a few miles inland, 
at Kingston, and there Ebenezer Webster was born 
in 1739. Late in the Seven Years' War, Ebenezer 
Webster enlisted in the partisan troop celebrated as 
Rogers's " Rangers," and after some hard service and 
wild adventure returned home at the peace of 1763 
with the rank of captain. He was soon after married, 
and with a company of friends and neighbours went 
to found the town of Salisbury, deep in the wilderness 
by the upper waters of the Merrimac and in the shadow 
of Kearsarge Mountain. Captain Webster's log house 
was built on a hill at the northern end of the township, 
and between that hill and Montreal, two hundred miles 
distant, there was nothing but the unbroken pine for- 
est, with its prowling Indians and wolves. In 1775 
the neighbourhood had become more populous, so 
that when the stout captain went to join the Conti- 
nental army he took with him two hundred men. He 
served in almost every campaign of the Revolutionary 
War, and rose to the rank of colonel. At Bennington 

365 



366 DANIEL WEBSTER 

he was one of the foremost in storming the Ger- 
man intrenchments ; at West Point, on the night of 
the dreadful day which saw Benedict Arnold's flight 
to the Vulture^ when doubt and misgiving were every- 
where, he was placed in command of the guard at 
headquarters, and Washington said to him, " Colonel 
Webster, I believe I can trust your In 1783 this 
veteran of two wars became owner of the Elms Farm 
in Salisbury, and lived there until his death, in 1806. 
He served as representative and senator in the New 
Hampshire legislature, and as judge in the Court of 
Common Pleas. In i ']%^ he was member of the state 
convention which ratified the federal Constitution. 
At the first meeting of that convention, which 
adjourned without a vote, he was bound, like the 
majority of the delegates, by instructions from his 
townsmen, to oppose the adoption of the Constitution. 
Before the second meeting he sought and obtained 
permission to act according to his own judgment; 
and when the vote was about to be taken he made 
the following brief but conclusive speech : " Mr. 
President, I have listened to the arguments for and 
against the Constitution. I am convinced such a gov- 
ernment as that Constitution will establish, if adopted 
— a government acting directly on the people of the 
states — is necessary for the common defence and the 
common welfare. It is the only government which 
will enable us to pay off the national debt — the debt 
which we owe for the Revolution, and which we are 
bound in honour fully and fairly to discharge. Be- 
sides, I have followed the lead of Washington through 
seven years of war, and I have never been misled. 
His name is subscribed to this Constitution. He 



AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 367 

will not mislead us now. I shall vote for its adop- 
tion" (Curtis, I. 10). 

Colonel Webster was noted for manly beauty and 
noble bearing, for tireless industry, broad intelligence, 
and tenacious memory, and for most devoted and self- 
sacrificing love for his children. Of these there were 
five by the first wife, who died in 1774; and five by 
the second wife, Abigail Eastman, a lady of rare intel- 
ligence and strength of character. The youngest son, 
Daniel, was born on the i8th of January, 1782, so puny 
and sickly a babe that it was thought he could not 
live to grow up. As a lad he was considered too deli- 
cate for hard work on the farm, and was accordingly 
allowed a great deal of time for play. Much of this 
leisure he spent in fishing and hunting, or in roaming 
about the woods, the rest in reading. He never could 
remember when he learned to read. His thirst for 
knowledge was insatiable ; he read every book that 
came within reach, and conned his favourite authors 
till he knew them by heart. In May, 1796, he was 
sent to Exeter Academy, where he made rapid prog- 
ress with his studies, but was so overcome by shyness 
that he found it impossible to stand up and "speak 
pieces " before his schoolmates. When he saw so 
many eyes turned toward him, the words would not 
come, the master's encouraging remarks only added to 
his confusion, and he would go away and cry from 
vexation. But despite this timidity, his natural gifts 
as an orator had already begun to show themselves. 
His great, dark, lustrous eyes and rich voice, with its 
musical inflections, were already exerting fascination 
upon all who came within their range. Passing team- 
sters would stop their horses, farmers at work in 



368 DANIEL WEBSTER 

the field would pause, sickle in hand, to hear him 
recite verses from the Bible, Dr. Watts's hymns, or 
passages from Addison or Pope. Although Ebenezer 
Webster found it difficult, by unremitting labour and 
strictest economy, to support his numerous family, he 
saw such signs of promise in Daniel as to convince 
him that it was worth while, at whatever cost, to send 
him to college. Accordingly, in February, 1797, he 
took him from school, in order to hasten his prepara- 
tory studies by the aid of a private tutor, the Rev. 
Samuel Wood of Boscawen. It was on the sleigh- 
ride to that town, as they were toiling up a mountain- 
ous road through drifted snow, that Colonel Webster 
informed Daniel of his plans. The sensitive, warm- 
hearted boy, who had hardly dared hope for such good 
fortune and keenly felt the sacrifice it involved, laid 
his head upon his father's shoulder and burst into 
tears. After six months with his tutor, he had learned 
enough to fulfil the slender requirements of those 
days for admission to Dartmouth College, where he 
was duly graduated in 1801. He did not take rank at 
the head of his class, but it was observed that he was 
capable of great industry, that he seized an idea with 
surprising quickness, that his memory was prodigious, 
and his power of lucid statement unrivalled. Along 
with these enviable gifts he possessed that supreme 
poetic quality that defies analysis but is at once recog- 
nized as genius. He was naturally, therefore, consid- 
ered by tutors and fellow-students the most remarkable 
man in the college, and the position of superiority thus 
early gained was easily maintained through life and 
wherever he was placed. While at college he con- 
quered or outgrew his boyish shyness, so as to take g 



AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 369 

pleasure in public speaking, and his eloquence soon 
attracted so much notice that in 1800 the townspeople 
of Hanover selected this undergraduate to deliver the 
Fourth of July oration. There he began to preach that 
love for the Constitution and the Union which was to 
form his chief theme throughout life. After leaving 
college he went into a lawyer's office in Salisbury, and 
began studying law ; but he had made up his mind to 
help his elder brother Ezekiel, of whom he was devot- 
edly fond, to go through college, and this made it nec- 
essary for him to earn money by teaching in a country 
school. In July, 1804, he came to Boston in search of 
employment in some office where he might complete 
his studies. He was so fortunate as to find favour in 
the eyes of Christopher Gore, just returned from his 
mission to England. In Mr. Gore's office, as student 
and clerk, he could see some of the most eminent men 
in New England. In 1805 he went to Boscawen, and 
in two years' time had acquired a good country prac- 
tice, which he turned over to his brother Ezekiel. He 
now removed to Portsmouth, where his reputation 
grew rapidly, so that he was soon considered a worthy 
antagonist to Jeremiah Mason, one of the greatest 
lawyers this country has ever produced. In June, 
1808, he married Miss Grace Fletcher, of Hopkinton, 
New Hampshire. 

His first important political pamphlet, published 
that year, was a criticism on the embargo.^ In 181 2, 

^ In connection with the Embargo that aroused such wide controversy in 
New England, a correspondent called Dr. Fiske's attention to a jingle that was 
passed from one to another of the wits of that generation, and was attributed 
by some to Lucius Manlius Sargent. It ran as follows: — 

" Take nothing from nothing and nothing remains ; 
Who votes for the Embargo is a fool for his pains." 
2 B 



Z70 DANIEL WEBSTER 

in a speech before the Washington Benevolent Society 
at Portsmouth, he summarized the objections of the 
New England people to the war just declared against 
Great Britain. He was immediately afterward chosen 
delegate to a convention of the people of Rockingham 
County, and drew up the so-called " Rockingham 
Memorial," addressed to President Madison, which 
contained a formal protest against the war. In the 
y following autumn he was elected to Congress, and on 
taking his seat, in May, 1813, he was placed on the 
Committee on Foreign Relations. His first step in 
Congress was the introduction of a series of resolutions 
aimed at the President, and calling for a statement 
of the time and manner in which Napoleon's pretended 
revocation of his decrees against American shipping 
had been announced to the United States. His first 
great speech, January 14, 18 14, was in opposition to the 
bill for encouraging enlistments, and at the close of 
that year he opposed Secretary Monroe's measures for 
enforcing what was known as the "draft of 18 14." 
But while Mr. Webster's attitude toward the adminis- 
tration was that of the Federalist party to which he ' 
belonged, he did not go so far as the leaders of that 
party in New England. He condemned the embargo 
as more harmful to ourselves than to the enemy, as 
there is no doubt it was ; he disapproved the policy of 
invading Canada, and maintained that our wisest 
course was to increase the strength of the navy ; -am - 
on these points history will probably judge him to '- 
have been correct. But in his opinion that the war 
itself was unnecessary and injurious to the country, he 
was probably, like most New Englanders of that time, 
mistaken. Could he have foreseen and taken into the 



AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 37 1 

account the rapid and powerful development of national 
feeling in the United States which the war called forth, 
it would have modified his view ; for it is clear that the 
war party, represented by Henry Clay and his friends, 
was at that moment the truly national party, and Mr. 
Webster's sympathies were then, as always, in favour of / 
the broadest nationalism, and entirely opposed to every 
sort of sectional or particularist policy. This broad 
national spirit, which was strong enough in the two 
Adamses to sever their connection with the Federalists 
of New England, led Mr. Webster to use his influence 
successfully to keep New Hampshire out of the Hart- 
ford convention. In the 13th Congress, however, we 
find him voting 191 times on the same side with 
Timothy Pickering, and only 4 times on the opposite 
side. Other questions were discussed besides those 
relating to the war. In this and the next Congress 
the most important work done by Mr. Webster was 
concerned with the questions of currency and a 
national bank. He did good service in killing the 
pernicious scheme for a bank endowed with the power 
of issuing irredeemable notes and obliged to lend 
money to the government. He was even disposed to 
condemn outright the policy of allowing the govern- 
ment to take any part whatever in the management of 
the bank. He also opposed a protective tariff, but by 
supporting Mr. Calhoun's bill for internal improve- J 
ments he put himself on record as a loose construc- 
tionist. In the light of subsequent events it seems 
odd to find Mr. Calhoun defending the policy of inter- 
nal improvements on the ground of its tendency to 
consolidate the Union, and it seems odd to find Mr. 
Webster in cordial alliance with the great South 



372 DANIEL WEBSTER 

Carolinian upon this or any other question. But it is 
to be borne in mind that, owing to the concessions 
made to slavery in the federal Constitution, South 
Carolina was at first strongly Federalist in her politics, 
and but for her attitude in this regard it is not at all 
likely that the Constitution would ever have been 
ratified. It was the prompt action of South Carolina 
in I ySS that killed the promising scheme of the Anti- 
federalists of Virginia, headed by Patrick Henry, for a 
separate Southern confederacy. It was not until after 
1820 that South Carolina started upon the opposite 
course, which in less than ten years was to carry her 
to the verge of secession. It was the strength of the 
Northern opposition to the admission of Missouri as a 
slave state that first alarmed South Carolina ; and her 
political alliance with New England was broken when 
the latter section of the country began to declare itself 
in favour of high tariffs. But in 18 16 it was quite 
natural that, on a question concerning the general 
powers of the federal government, Mr. Calhoun and 
Mr. Webster should be found on the same side. In 
the course of this session of Congress the cantankerous 
Randolph saw fit to defy Mr. Webster to mortal com- 
bat for words spoken in debate ; but the challenge was 
declined with grim humour. Mr. Webster said that he 
did not feel called upon to expose his life at the request 
of any other man who might be willing to risk his 
own ; but he should always " be prepared to repel in a 
suitable manner the aggression of any man " who 
should venture to "presume upon such a refusal." 
Mr. Randolph had thus no alternative but to ignore 
this very significant hint, and gracefully declare his 
nice sense of honour quite satisfied. 



AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 373 

At the expiration of his second term in Congress, 
Mr. Webster retired for a while to private life. He 
was in great need of money, and, moving from Ports- 
mouth to Boston about this time, he soon found him- 
self earning in his profession not less than $20,000 a 
year. One of the first cases upon which he was now 
engaged was the famous Dartmouth College affair. 
While Mr. Webster's management of this case went 
far toward placing him at the head of the American 
bar, the political significance of its decision was such 
as to make it an important event in the history of the 
United States. It shows Mr. Webster not only as a 
great constitutional lawyer and consummate advocate, 
but also as a powerful champion of federalism. In 
its origin Dartmouth College was a missionary school 
for Indians, founded in 1754 by the Rev. Eleazar 
Wheelock, at Lebanon, Connecticut. After a few 
years, funds were raised by private subscription for 
the purpose of enlarging the school into a college, 
and as the Earl of Dartmouth had been one of the 
chief contributors, Dr. Wheelock appointed him and 
other persons trustees of the property. The site of 
the college was fixed in New Hampshire, and a royal 
charter in 1769 created it a perpetual corporation. 
The charter recognized Wheelock as founder, and 
appointed him president, with power to name his suc- 
cessor, subject to confirmation by the trustees. Dr. 
Wheelock devised the presidency to his son John 
Wheelock, who accordingly became his successor. 
The charter, in expressly forbidding the exclusion of 
any person on account of his religious belief, reflected 
the broad and tolerant disposition of Dr. Wheelock, 
who was a liberal Presbyterian, and as such had been 



374 DANIEL WEBSTER 

engaged in prolonged controversy with that famous 
representative of the strictest Congregationalism, Dr. 
Joseph Bellamy. In 1793, Bellamy's pupil, Nathaniel 
Niles, became a trustee of Dartmouth, and between 
him and John Wheelock the old controversy was 
revived and kept up with increasing bitterness for 
several years, dividing the board of trustees into two 
hostile parties. At length, in 1809, the party opposed 
to President Wheelock gained a majority in the board, 
and thus became enabled in various ways to balk and 
harass the president, until in 181 5 the quarrel broke 
forth into a war of pamphlets and editorial articles that 
convulsed the whole state of New Hampshire. The 
Congregational Church was at that time the estab- 
lished church in New Hampshire, supported by taxa- 
tion, and the Federalist party found its strongest 
adherents among the members of that church. Natu- 
rally, therefore, the members of other churches, and 
persons opposed on general principles to the estab- 
lishment of a state church, were inclined to take sides 
with the Republicans. In 181 5 President Wheelock 
petitioned the legislature for a committee to investi- 
gate the conduct of the trustees, whom he accused of 
various offences, from intolerance in matters of reli- 
gion to improper management of the funds. Thus the 
affair soon became a party question, in which the 
Federalists upheld the trustees, while the Republi- 
cans sympathized with the president. The legisla- 
ture granted the petition for a committee, but the 
trustees forthwith, in a somewhat too rash spirit of 
defiance, deposed Mr. Wheelock and chose a new 
president, the Rev. Francis Brown. In the ensuing 
state election Mr. Wheelock and his sympathizers 



AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 375 

went over to the Republicans, who thus succeeded in 
electing their candidate for governor, with a majority 
of the legislature. In June, 18 16, the new legislature 
passed an act reorganizing the college, and a new 
board of trustees was at once appointed by the gov- 
ernor. Judge Woodward, secretary of the old board, 
went over to the new board and became its secretary, 
taking with him the college seal. The new board pro- 
ceeded to expel the old board, which forthwith brought 
suit against Judge Woodward in an action of trover 
for the college seal. The case was tried in May, 1 8 1 7, 
with those two great lawyers, Jeremiah Mason and 
Jeremiah Smith, as counsel for the plaintiffs. It was 
then postponed till September, when Mr. Webster was 
secured by the plaintiffs as an additional counsel. The 
plaintiffs contended that in the case of a corporation 
chartered for private uses, any alleged misconduct of 
the trustees was properly a question for the courts, 
and not for the legislature, which in meddling with 
such a question plainly transcended its powers. Their 
chief reliance was upon this point, but they contended 
that the act of legislature reorganizing the college was 
an act impairing the obligation of a contract, and 
therefore violated the Constitution of the United 
States. Nothing is more interesting or more signifi- 
cant in the history of the case than the fact that 
neither of the three great lawyers who represented the 
plaintiffs at first attached much importance to this 
second point, which to-day seems so obvious that we 
only wonder how any one could ever for a moment 
have hesitated about urging it. One could hardly 
find anywhere a more forcible illustration of the 
change which seventy years have wrought in our 



376 DANIEL WEBSTER 

conception of the sphere and duties of the federal 
government; and one of the most potent factors in 
that change was the decision of the Supreme Court in 
this very case of Dartmouth College. The state court 
at Exeter decided against the plaintiffs, and the deci- 
sion would have been final had it not been for the 
point which at first they had approached so gingerly, 
but which now enabled them to carry up their case to 
the Supreme Court of the United States. 

It now remained to be seen whether the federal 
tribunal would admit the position of the plaintiffs, 
or dismiss the case for want of jurisdiction. As the elder 
counsel were unable to go to Washington, it fell to 
Mr. Webster to conduct the case, which was tried in 
March, 1818. He argued that the charter of Dart- 
mouth College created a private corporation for ad- 
ministering a charity ; that in the administration of 
such uses the trustees have a recognized right of 
property ; that the grant of such a charter is a contract 
between the sovereign power and the grantees, and 
descends to their successors, and that therefore the 
act of the New Hampshire legislature, in taking away 
the government from one board of trustees and con- 
ferring it upon another, was a violation of contract, 
and as such an infringement of the federal Constitu- 
tion. These legal points were argued by Mr. Web- 
ster with masterful cogency, and reenforced by 
illustrations and allusions well calculated to appeal 
to the Federalist sympathies of Chief Justice Marshall. 
For, besides the legal interpretation, there was an 
important political side to the question which recom- 
mended it to the earnest consideration of the great 
judge, who, in building up a new system of federal 



AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION Z']'] 

jurisprudence in accordance with the spirit of Eng- 
lish precedents, was often to some extent obUged to 
make law as well as declare it. Should the legislative 
action of a state upon its own citizens be final, so that 
there should be no secure shelter for vested rights 
against the unchecked caprice of a mere majority- 
swayed by some momentary impulse ; or was the 
authority of the federal government competent to 
insure that the state, in dealing with individuals or 
with private corporations, should recognize certain 
fundamental principles of law as sacred and unassail- 
able ? The latter alternative was, of course, the one 
for which our federal Constitution was designed to 
provide, but incalculable consequences depended upon 
the extent of jurisdiction which, in accordance with 
that instrument, might be claimed by the federal courts. 
Here was a question that touched the master chord 
in the natures alike of the mighty advocate and of 
the mighty judge, and as the one spoke and the other 
listened, it must have been, indeed, a memorable 
scene. Mr. Webster possessed in the highest degree 
the art of so presenting a case that the mere statement 
seemed equivalent to demonstration ;and never perhaps 
did he exhibit that art in greater perfection or use it to 
better purpose than in this argument, in which the 
political aspect of the case was plainly seen and felt, 
but never allowed to intrude upon the foreground, 
where the purely legal considerations were mustered. 
The concluding sentences have often been remarked 
as bold and consummate in their art, in suddenly 
abandoning argument and appealing to emotion. But 
the art in it was doubtless that best kind of art that 
nature makes. Mr. Webster was a man of intense 



37^ DANIEL WEBSTER 



feelings. He was not merely defending a great prin- 
ciple of constitutional government, but he was pleading 
the cause of the little college where, by dint of hard 
work and many sacrifices, his brother Ezekiel and him- 
self had obtained their education. Instead of describ- 
ing in general terms what would happen if American 
colleges were liable to be drawn into the political 
arena and their government made the sport of contend- 
ing parties, he closed his speech with these few sim- 
ple words : " This, sir, is my case. It is the case not 
merely of that humble institution, it is the case of 
every college in our land. . . . Sir, you may destroy 
this little institution ; it is weak, it is in your hands ! 
I know it is one of the lesser lights in the literary 
horizon of our country. You may put it out. But if 
you do so, you must carry through your work ! You 
must extinguish one after another those greater lights 
of science which for more than a century have thrown 
their radiance over our land. It is, sir, as I have said, 
a small college. And yet, there are those who love 
it." Here Mr. Webster's voice trembled and his eyes 
were wet with tears. Coming from this grand and 
stately man, who for five hours had held judges and 
audience spellbound by power of reasoning and beauty 
of phrase, the effect of this natural burst of feeling 
was extraordinary. Leaning forward in breathless 
silence, with eyes suffused and with beating hearts, 
judges and audience forgot all else in eager watching 
of every movement of the speaker's face, when recover- 
ing himself he said in his most solemn tones, addressing 
the chief justice : " Sir, I know not how others may 
feel [glancing at the opponents of the college before 
him], but for myself, when I see my Alma Mater sur-. 



AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 379 

rounded, like Caesar in the senate-house, by those who 
are reiterating stab after stab, I would not for this 
right hand have her turn to me and say, Et tu quoque, 
mi fill ! And thou too, my son ! " As he sat down, 
said a gentleman who was present, " there was a death- 
like stillness throughout the room for some moments ; 
every one seemed to be slowly recovering himself, and 
coming gradually back to his ordinary range of thought 
and feeling." The decision of the court, rendered in 
the following autumn, sustained Mr. Webster and set 
aside the act of the legislature as unconstitutional. It 
was one of those far-reaching decisions in which the 
Supreme Court, under Marshall, fixed the interpretation 
of the Constitution in such wise as to add greatly to 
its potency as a fundamental instrument of government. 
It was a case in which a contrary decision would "^ 
have altered the whole future of American law, and 
would have modified our political and social develop- 
ment in many ways. The clause of our Constitution 
prohibiting state legislation in impairment of contracts, 
like most such general provisions, stood in need of 
judicial decisions to determine its scope. By bringing 
under the protection of this clause every charter 
granted by a state, the decision in the Dartmouth 
College case went farther perhaps than any other in '^ 
our history toward limiting state sovereignty and 
extending the federal jurisdiction. 
: This extension of federal power was, moreover, 
entirely in the right direction. It was conservative, 
pacific, and just in its tendencies. It is no part of the 
legitimate business of government to help people in 
business, whether under pretence of fostering domestic 
industry, or what not ; but it is the legitimate business 



380 DANIEL WEBSTER 

of government to preserve order and punish criminals, 
to see that contracts are fulfilled, that charters are kept 
inviolate, and the foundations of human confidence not 
rudely or wantonly disturbed, for only thus does the com- 
munity insure for its members a fair field and no favour. 

In the Dartmouth College case we may see one 
chapter in Mr. Webster's great life-work of strength- 
ening the federal government and tightening the 
bonds of pacific union among the states. 

In the Massachusetts convention of 1820 for revis- 
ing the state constitution, he next played an impor- 
tant part. He advocated with success the abolition 
of religious tests for office-holders, and in a speech 
in support of the feature of property representation 
in the senate he examined the theory and practice of 
bicameral legislation. His discussion of that subject 
is well worthy of study. In the same year, at the 
celebration of the second centennial of the landing of 
the Pilgrims, his commemorative oration was one of 
the noblest ever delivered. In 1825, on the laying 
of the corner-stone of Bunker Hill monument, he 
attained still higher perfection of eloquence ; and one 
year later, on the deaths of Adams and Jefferson, his 
eulogy upon those statesmen completed a trio of his- 
torical addresses unsurpassed in splendour. The 
spirit which animates these orations is that of the 
broadest patriotism, enlightened by a clear perception 
of the fundamental importance of the federal union 
between the states, and an ever present consciousness 
of the mighty future of our country and its moral 
significance in the history of the world. Such topics 
have often been treated as commonplaces, and made 
the theme of vapid rhetoric; but under Daniel 



AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 38 1 

Webster's treatment they acquired a philosophical 
value, and were fraught with most serious and earnest 
meaning. These orations were conceived in a spirit 
of religious devotion to the Union, and contributed 
powerfully toward awakening such a sentiment in 
those who read them afterward, while upon those who 
heard them from the lips of the majestic speaker the 
impression was such as could never be effaced. The 
historian must assign to them a high place among 
the literary influences that aroused in the American 
people a sentiment of union strong enough to endure 
the shock of war. 

In 1822 Mr. Webster was elected to Congress from 
the Boston district, and was twice reelected by a popu- 
lar vote that was almost unanimous. As chairman of 
the Judiciary Committee of the House, he prepared 
and carried the " crimes act," in which the criminal 
jurisprudence of the federal courts was thoroughly 
remodelled. The preparation of this bill showed in 
a high degree his constructive genius as a legislator, 
while in carrying it through Congress his parliamen- 
tary skill and persuasiveness in debate were equally 
conspicuous. Of his two most celebrated speeches in 
Congress during this period, the first related to the 
revolution in Greece. In January, 1824, Mr. Webster 
brought forward a resolution in favour of making 
provision for a commissioner to Greece, should Presi- 
dent Monroe see fit to appoint one. In his speech on 
this occasion, he set forth the hostility of the American 
people to the principles, motives, and methods of the 
Holy Alliance, and their sympathy with such struggles 
for self-government as that in which the Greeks were 
engaged. The resolution was not adopted, but the 



382 DANIEL WEBSTER 

speech gave its author a European reputation. It 
was translated into almost all the languages of 
Europe, from Gibraltar to the Volga, and called forth 
much lively comment. 

The other great speech, delivered in April, 1824, 
was what is commonly called Mr. Webster's "free 
trade speech." A bill had been introduced for revis- 
ing the tariff in such a way as to extend the operation 
of the protective system. In this speech Mr. Web- 
ster found fault with the phrase " American policy," as 
applied by Mr. Clay to the system of high protective 
duties. " If names are thought necessary," said Mr. 
Webster, " it would be well enough, one would think, 
that the name should be in some measure descriptive 
of the thing; and since Mr. Speaker denominates the 
policy which he recommends a 'new policy in this 
countr)^ ' ; since he speaks of the present measure as a 
new era in our legislation ; since he professes to invite 
us to depart from our accustomed course, to instruct 
ourselves by the wisdom of others, and to adopt the 
policy of the most distinguished foreign states, — one 
is a little curious to know with what propriety of 
speech this imitation of other nations is denominated 
an ' American policy,' while, on the contrary, a prefer- 
ence for our own established system, as it now actually 
exists and always has existed, is called a 'foreign 
policy.' This favourite American policy is what 
America has never tried ; and this odious foreign ! 
policy is what, as we are told, foreign states have never 
pursued. Sir, that is the truest American policy 
which shall most usefully employ American capital 
and American labour." After this exordium, Mr. Web- 
ster went on to give a masterly exposition of some of I 



AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 383 

the elementary theorems of poHtical economy, and a 
survey, at once comprehensive and accurate, of the 
condition of American industry at the time. He not 
only attacked Mr. Clay's policy on broad national 
grounds, but also showed more specifically that it was 
likely to prove injurious to the maritime commerce in 
which the New England states had so long taken the 
lead ; and he concluded by characterizing that policy 
as " so burdensome and so dangerous to that interest 
which has steadily enriched, gallantly defended, and 
proudly distinguished us, that nothing can prevail 
upon me to give it my support." Upon this last clause 
of his speech he was afterward enabled to rest a partial 
justification of his change of attitude toward the tariff. 
In politics Mr. Webster occupied at this time quite 
an independent position. The old Federalist party, 
to which he had formerly belonged, was completely 
broken down, and the new National Republican party, 
with its inheritance of many of the principles, motives, 
and methods of the federalists, was just beginning to 
take shape under the leadership of Adams and Clay. 
Between these eminent statesmen and Mr. Webster, 
the state of feeling was not such as to insure cordial 
cooperation ; but in their views of government there 
was similarity enough to bring them together in oppo- 
sition to the new Democratic party represented by 
Jackson, Benton, and Van Buren. With the extreme 
Southern views of Crawford and Calhoun it was im- 
possible that he should sympathize, although his per- 
sonal relations with those leaders were quite friendly, 
and after the death of Calhoun the noblest eulogium 
upon his character and motives was made by Mr. 
Webster. Coleridge once said that every man is born 



384 DANIEL WEBSTER 

either an Aristotelian or a Platonist. There is a sense 
in which all American statesmen may be said to 
be intellectually the descendants and disciples, either 
of Jefferson or of Hamilton, and as a representative 
follower of Hamilton, Mr. Webster was sure to be 
drawn rather toward Clay than toward Jackson. The 
course of industrial events in New England was such as 
to involve changes of opinion in that part of the country, 
which were soon reflected in a complete reversal of Mr. 
Webster's attitude toward the tariff. In 1827 he was 
elected to the United States Senate. In that year an 
agitation was begun by the woollen manufacturers, 
which soon developed into a promiscuous scramble 
among different industries for aid from government, 
and finally resulted in thi tariff of 1828. That act, 
which was generally known at the time as " the tariff 
of abominations," was the first extreme application of 
the protective system in our federal legislation. When 
the bill was pending before the Senate in April, 1828, 
Mr. Webster made a memorable speech, in which he 
completely abandoned the position he had held in 1824, 
and from this time forth he was a supporter of the 
policy of Mr. Clay and the protectionists. For this 
change of attitude he was naturally praised by his new 
allies, who were glad to interpret it as a powerful argu- 
ment in favour of their views. By every one else he 
was blamed, and this speech has often been cited, to- 
gether with that of March 7, 1850, as proving that Mr. 
Webster was governed by unworthy motives and want- 
ing in political principle. The two cases, as we shall 
see, are in many respects parallel. In neither case did 
Mr. Webster attempt to conceal or disguise his real 
motives. In 1828 he frankly admitted that the policy 



AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 385 

of protection to manufacturers, by means of tariff duties, 
was a policy of which he had disapproved, whether as J 
a poHtical economist or as a representative of the inter- 
ests of New England. Against his own opposition 
and that of New England the act of 1824 had passed. 
" What, then, was New England to do ? . . . Was she 
to hold out forever against the course of the govern- 
ment, and see herself losing on one side and yet make 
no effort to sustain herself on the other? No, sir. 
Nothing was left for New England but to conform her- 
self to the will of others. Nothing was left to her but 
to consider that the government had fixed and deter- 
mined its own policy ; and that policy was protectionr 
In other words, the tariff policy adopted at Washing- 
ton, while threatening the commercial interests of 
New England, had favoured the investment of capital 
in manufactures there, and it was not becoming in a 
representative of New England to take part in disturb- 
ing the new arrangement of things. This argument, 
if pushed far enough, would end in the doctrine — now 
apparently obsolete, though it has often been attacked 
and defended — that a senator is simply the ambas- 
sador of his state in Congress. With Mr. Webster it 
went so far as to modify essentially his expressions of 
opinion as to the constitutionality of protective legis- 
lation. He had formerly been inclined to interpret 
the Constitution strictly upon this point, but in 1828 
and afterward his position was that of the loose con- 
structionists. From the economic point of view he 
would doubtless have been a safer guide for New Eng- 
land had he insisted upon acting up to the full meas- 
ure of his convictions. He was too honest a thinker 
to be able to conceal the real workings of his mind, 

2C 



386 DANIEL WEBSTER 

and his speeches in defence of the high tariff policy 
never once had the ring of true metal. Other men 
might be fooled by the sophistry of protectionism, but 
he was not. It would be unfair, however, to charge 
him with conscious dereliction to principle in this 
matter. It would be more just and more correct to 
say that, amid the complication of conflicting interests, 
he felt it necessary to subordinate one question to an- 
other that was at that time clearly more important. 
His conduct was far more the result of his strong Fed- 
eralist bias than of the temperament which has some- 
times been called " opportunism." 

This tariff of 1828 soon furnished an occasion for 
the display of his strong Federalist spirit in a way that 
was most serviceable for his country and has earned 
for him undying fame as an orator and statesman. It 
led to the distinct announcement of the principles of 
nullification by the public men of South Carolina, with 
Mr. Calhoun at their head. During President Jack- 
son's first term the question as to nullification seemed 
to occupy everybody's thoughts, and had a way of 
intruding upon the discussion of all other questions. 
In December, 1829, Samuel A. Foote of Connecticut 
presented to the Senate a resolution inquiring into 
the expediency of limiting the sales of the public lands 
to those already in the market, besides suspending the 
surveys of the public lands and abolishing the office 
of Surveyor-general. The resolution was quite natu- 
rally resented by the Western senators, as having a 
tendency to check the growth of their section of the 
country. The debate was opened by Mr. Benton, and 
lasted several weeks, with increasing bitterness. The 
belief in the hostility of the New England states toward 



AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION S^7 

the West was shared by many Southern senators, who 
desired to unite South and West in opposition to the 
tariff. On the 19th of January, 1830, Robert Y. Hayne 
of South CaroUna attacked the New England states, 
accusing them of aiming by their protective pohcy at 
aggrandizing themselves at the expense of all the rest 
of the Union. On the next day Mr. Webster deliv- 
ered his " first speech on Foote's resolution," in which 
he took up Mr. Hayne's accusations and answered them 
with great power. This retort provoked a long and 
able reply from Mr. Hayne, in which he not only 
assailed Mr. Webster and Massachusetts and New 
England, but set forth quite ingeniously and elabo- 
rately the doctrines of nullification. In view of the 
political agitation then going on in South Carolina, it 
was felt that this speech would work practical mischief 
unless it should meet with instant refutation. It was 
finished on the 25th of January, and on the next two 
days Mr. Webster delivered his " second speech on 
Foote's resolution," better known in history as the 
" Reply to Hayne." The debate had now lasted so 
long that people had come from different parts of the 
country to Washington to hear it, and on the 26th of 
January the crowd not only filled the galleries and 
invaded the floor of the senate-chamber, but occupied 
all the lobbies and entries within hearing and even 
beyond. In the first part of his speech Mr. Webster 
replied to the aspersions upon himself and New Eng- 
land ; in the second part he attacked with weighty 
argument and keen-edged sarcasm the doctrine of nulli- 
fication. He did not undertake to deny the right of 
revolution, as a last resort in cases with which legal 
and constitutional methods are found inadequate to 



J 



388 DANIEL WEBSTER 

deal ; but he assailed the theory of the Constitution 
maintained by Calhoun and his followers, according 
to which nullification was a right the exercise of which 
was compatible with loyal adherence to the Constitu- 
tion. His course of argument was twofold: he sought 
to show, first, that the theory of the Constitution as a 
terminable league or compact between sovereign states 
was unsupported by the history of its origin, and sec- 
ondly, that the attempt, on the part of any state, to act 
upon that theory must necessarily entail civil war or 
the disruption of the Union. As to the sufficiency 
of his historical argument, there has been much differ- 
ence of opinion. The question is difficult to deal with 
in such a way as to reach an unassailable conclusion, 
and the difficulty is largely due to the fact that in the 
various ratifying conventions of 1 787-1 789 the men 
who advocated the adoption of the Constitution did 
not all hold the same opinions as to the significance of 
what they were doing. There was great divergence 
of opinion, and plenty of room for antagonisms of 
interpretation to grow up as irreconcilable as those 
of Webster and Calhoun. If the South Carolina doc- 
trine distorted history in one direction, that of Mr. Web- 
ster certainly departed somewhat from the record in 
the other ; but the latter was fully in harmony with the 
actual course of our national development and with 
the increased and increasing strength of the sentiment 
of union at the time when it was propounded with 
such powerful reasoning and such magnificent elo-» 
quence in the " Reply to Hayne." As an appeal to t 
the common sense of the American people, nothing! 
could be more masterly than Mr. Webster's demon- 1 
stration that nullification practically meant revolution ;i 



AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 389 

and their unalterable opinion of the soundness of his 
argument was amply illustrated when at length the 
crisis came, which he deprecated with such intensity 
of emotion in his concluding sentences. To some of 
the senators who listened to the speech, as for instance 
Thomas H. Benton, it seemed as if the passionate elo- 
quence of its close concerned itself with imaginary 
dangers never likely to be realized ; but the event 
showed that Mr. Webster estimated correctly the 
perilousness of the doctrine against which he was con- 
tending. For genuine oratorical power, the " Reply 
to Hayne " is probably the greatest speech that has 
been delivered since the oration of Demosthenes on 
the crown. The comparison is natural, as there are 
points in the American orator that forcibly remind 
one of the Athenian. There is the fine sense of pro- 
portion and fitness, the massive weight of argument 
due to transparent clearness and matchless symmetry 
of statement, and along with the rest a truly Attic sim- 
plicity of diction. Mr. Webster never indulged in mere 
rhetorical flights; his sentences, simple in structure 
and weighted with meaning, went straight to the 
mark; and his arguments were so skilfully framed that, 
while his most learned and critical hearers were im- 
pressed with a sense of their conclusiveness, no man 
of ordinary intelligence could fail to understand them. 
To these high qualifications of the orator was added 
such a physical presence as but few men have been 
endowed with. I believe it was Carlyle who said of 
him, " I wonder if any man can possibly be as great as 
he looks ! " ^ Mr. Webster's appearance was indeed 

^ In his paper on Andrew Jackson and American Democracy, page 270 of this 
volume, Dr. Fiske refers to the bright blue coat with brass buttons and buff waist- 
coat as worn by Daniel Webster, which came to be a symbol of Americanism. In 



390 DANIEL WEBSTER 

one of unequalled dignity and power, his voice was 
rich and musical, and the impressiveness of his deliv- 
ery was enhanced by the depth of genuine manly feel- 
ing with which he spoke. Yet while his great speeches 
owed so much of their overpowering effect to the look 
and manner of the man, they were at the same time 
masterpieces of literature. Like the speeches of De- 
mosthenes, they were capable of swaying the reader as 
well as the hearer, and their effects went far beyond 
the audience and far beyond the occasion of their 
delivery. 

In all these respects the " Reply to Hayne " marks 
the culmination of Mr. Webster's power as an orator. 
Of all the occasions of his life, this encounter with the 

discussing " the provincialism oiante bellum days," the late Mr. Justin Winsor wrote 
Dr. Fiske, February 3, 1892, as follows: "... the blue coat and brass buttons, 
which so grandly set off the figure of Webster — I remember him in them often. 
He wore them when he made that speech at Marshfield, in which he showed 
his bitter disappointment that the Whigs had not nominated him rather than 
Taylor, and I was close to him during the whole of it. But I never supposed that 
it was solely because it gave brilliancy to a dignified carriage that he clung to 
that costume; but rather because it showed the Whig colours of blue and yellow, 
which Fox and his fellows had made common in precisely the same way in Eng- 
land during the early years of the century; and indeed I think George IV. when 
Regent wore it, when not in state. Certainly it was not an uncommon dress in 
Europe at a later period. When I was there in the early fifties, I had a dress 
coat of blue, with brass buttons, made in Paris, and I was not by any means 
singular in wearing it in company in Paris and Heidelberg." 

A note on Dr. Boott, " Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," 2d edition, page 
294, throws further light on this point: "Francis Boott (born 1792, died 1863) 
. . , was , . . well known in connection with the Linnaean Society. . . . He is 
described (in a biographical sketch published in the Gardener'' s Chronicle, 1864) 
as having been one of the first physicians in London who gave up the customary 
black coat, knee breeches, and silk stockings, and adopted the ordinary dress of 
the period, a blue coat with brass buttons and a buff waistcoat, a costume which 
he continued to wear to the last." 

Though the blue-tailed coat was indeed an ordinary gentleman's costume in 
England, it stood, as may be seen from coloured prints of the day, rather for quiet 
and dignity than for "smartness" and fashion. In the United States it certainly 
developed independently into what Daniel Webster made it — a symbol of 
Americanism. 



AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 391 

doctrine of nullification on its first bold announcement 
in the Senate was certainly the greatest; and the 
speech was equal to the occasion. It struck a chord 
in the heart of the American people which had not 
ceased to vibrate when the crisis came thirty years 
later. It gave articulate expression to a sentiment of 
loyalty to the Union that went on growing until the 
American citizen was as prompt to fight for the Union 
as the Mussulman for his Prophet or the Cavalier for 
his king. It furnished, moreover, a clear and compre- 
hensive statement of the theory by which that senti- 
ment of loyalty was justified. Of the men who in 
after years gave up their lives for the Union, doubt- 
less the greater number had as schoolboys declaimed 
passages from this immortal speech and caught some 
inspiration from its fervid patriotism. Probably no 
other speech ever made in Congress has found so 
many readers or exerted so much influence in giving 
shape to men's thoughts. 

Three years afterward Mr. Webster returned to the 
struggle with nullification, being now pitted against 
the master of that doctrine instead of the disciple. 
In the interval South Carolina had attempted to put 
the doctrine into practice, and had been resolutely 
met by President Jackson with his proclamation of 
the loth of December, 1832. In response to a spe- 
cial message from the President, early in January, 
1833, the so-called "force bill," empowering the 
President to use the army and navy, if necessary, for 
enforcing the revenue laws in South Carolina, was 
reported in the Senate. The bill was opposed by 
Democrats who did not go so far as to approve of 
nullification, but the defection of these senators was 



392 DANIEL WEBSTER 

more than balanced by the accession of Mr. Webster, 
who upon this measure came promptly to the support 
of the administration. For this, says Benton, "his 
motives . . . were attacked, and he was accused of 
subserviency to the President for the sake of future 
favour. At the same time, all the support which he 
gave to these measures was the regular result of the 
principles which he laid down against nuUification in 
the debate with Mr. Hayne, and he could not have 
done less without being derelict to his own principles 
then avowed. It was a proud era in his life, support- 
ing with transcendent ability the cause of the Consti- 
tution and of the country, in the person of a chief 
magistrate to whom he was politically opposed, bursting 
the bonds of party at the call of duty, and display- 
ing a patriotism worthy of admiration and imitation. 
General Jackson felt the debt of gratitude and admira- 
tion which he owed him ; the country, without distinc- 
tion of party, felt the same. ... He was the colossal 
figure on the political stage during that eventful time; 
and his labours, splendid in their day, survive for the 
benefit of distant posterity " (" Thirty Years' View," 
I. 334). The support of the President's policy by Mr. 
Webster, and its enthusiastic approval by nearly all 
the Northern and a great many of the Southern peo- 
ple, seems to have alarmed Mr. Calhoun, probably not 
so much for his personal safety as for the welfare of 
his nullification schemes. The story that he was 
frightened by the rumour that Jackson had threatened 
to begin by arresting him on a charge of treason is 
now generally discredited. He had seen enough, 
however, to convince him that the theory of peace- 
ful nullification was not now likely to be realized. It 



AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 393 

was not his aim to provoke an armed collision, and 
accordingly a momentary alliance was made between 
himself and Mr. Clay, resulting in the compromise 
tariff bill of the 12th of February, 1833. Only four 
days elapsed between Mr. Webster's announcement of 
his intention to support the President and the intro- 
duction of this compromise measure. Mr. Webster 
at once opposed the compromise, both as unsound 
economically and as an unwise and dangerous conces- 
sion to the threats of the nullifiers. At this point the 
force bill was brought forward, and Mr. Calhoun 
made his great speech, February 15 and 16, in 
support of the resolutions he had introduced on the 
22d of January, afhrming the doctrine of nullifica- 
tion. To this Mr. Webster replied, February 16, 
with his speech entitled " The Constitution not a 
Compact between Sovereign States," in which he sup- 
plemented and reenforced the argument of the " Reply 
to Hayne." Mr. Calhoun's answer, February 26, was 
perhaps the most powerful speech he ever delivered, 
and Mr. Webster did not reply to it at length. The 
burden of the discussion was, what the American peo- 
ple really did when they adopted the federal Consti- 
tution. Did they simply create a league between 
sovereign states, or did they create a national govern- 
ment, which operates immediately upon individuals, 
and, without superseding the state governments, stands 
superior to them and claims a prior allegiance from 
all citizens ? It is now plain to be seen that in point 
of fact they did create such a national government ; 
but how far they realized at the outset what they were 
doing is quite another question. Mr. Webster's main 
conclusion was sustained with colossal strength ; but 



394 DANIEL WEBSTER 

his historical argument was in some places weak, and 
the weakness is unconsciously betrayed in a disposi- 
tion toward wire-drawn subtlety, from which Mr. 
Webster was usually quite free. His ingenious rea- 
soning upon the meaning of such words as "compact" 
and " accede " was easily demolished by Mr. Calhoun, 
who was, however, more successful in hitting upon his 
adversary's vulnerable points than in making good his 
own case. In fact, the historical question was not 
really so simple as it presented itself to the minds of 
those two great statesmen. But in whatever way it 
was to be settled, the force of Mr. Webster's practical 
conclusions remained, as he declared in the brief re- 
joinder with which he ended the discussion, — " Mr. 
President, turn this question over and present it as 
we will — argue it as we may — exhaust upon it all 
the fountains of metaphysics — stretch over it all the 
meshes of logical or political subtlety — it still comes 
to this, Shall we have a general government.? Shall 
we continue the union of the states under a govern- 
ment instead of a league t This is the upshot of the 
whole matter; because, if we are to have a govern- 
ment, that government must act like other govern- 
ments, by majorities ; it must have this power, like 
other governments, of enforcing its own laws and its 
own decisions ; clothed with authority by the people 
and always responsible to the people, it must be able 
to hold its course unchecked by external interposition. 
According to the gentleman's views of the matter, the 
Constitution is a league; according to mine, it is a 
regular popular government. This vital and all-impor- 
tant question the people will decide, and in deciding 
it they will determine whether, by ratifying the pres- 



AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 395 

ent Constitution and Frame of Government, they 
meant to do nothing more than to amend the articles 
of the old confederation." As the immediate result of 
the debates, both the force bill and the compromise 
tariff bill were adopted, and this enabled Mr. Calhoun 
to maintain that the useful and conservative character 
of nullification had been demonstrated, since the action 
of South Carolina had, without leading to violence, 
]ed to such modifications of the tariff as she desired. 
But the abiding result was, that Mr. Webster had set 
forth the theory upon which the Union was to be 
preserved, and that the administration, in acting upon 
that theory, had established a precedent for the next 
administration that should be called upon to confront 
a similar crisis. 

The alliance between Mr. Webster and President 
Jackson extended only to the question of maintaining 
the Union. As an advocate of the policy of a national ^ 
bank, a protective tariff, and internal improvements, 
Mr. Webster's natural place was by the side of Mr. 
Clay in the Whig party, which was now in the process 
of formation. He was also at one with both the 
Northern and the Southern sections of the Whig party 
in opposition to what Mr. Benton called the ''demos 
krateo " principle, according to which the President, 
in order to carry out the " will of the people," might 
feel himself authorized to override the constitutional 
limitations upon his power. This was not precisely 
what Mr. Benton meant by his principle, but it was 
the way in which it was practically illustrated in Jack- 
son's war against the bank. In the course of this 
struggle, Mr. Webster made more than sixty speeches, 
remarkable for their wide and accurate knowledge of 



396 DANIEL WEBSTER 

finance. His consummate mastery of statement is 
nowhere more thoroughly exemplified than in these 
speeches. Constitutional questions were brought up by 
Mr. Clay's resolutions censuring the President for the 
removal of the deposits and for dismissing William J. 
Duane, Secretary of the Treasury. In reply to the 
resolutions, President Jackson sent to the Senate his 
remarkable " Protest," in which he maintained that 
in the mere discussion of such resolutions that body 
transcended its constitutional prerogatives, and that 
the President is the "direct representative of the 
American people," charged with the duty, if need be, 
of protecting them against the usurpations of Con- 
gress. The Whigs maintained, with much truth, that 
this doctrine, if carried out in all its implications, 
would push democracy to the point where it merges 
in Caesarism. It was now that the opposition began 
to call themselves Whigs, and tried unsuccessfully 
to stigmatize the President's supporters as " Tories." 
Mr. Webster's speech on the President's protest, 
May 7, 1834, was one of great importance, and should 
be read by every student of our constitutional history.- 
In another elaborate speech, February 16, 1835, he 
tried to show that under a proper interpretation of 
the Constitution the power of removal, like the power 
of appointment, was vested in the President and Sen- 
ate conjointly, and that " the decision of Congress in 
1789, which separated the power of removal from the 
power of appointment, was founded on an erroneous 
construction of the Constitution." But subsequent 
opinion has upheld the decision of 1789, leaving the 
speech to serve as an illustration of the way in which, 
under the stress of a particular contest, the Whigs 



AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 397 

were as ready to strain the Constitution in one direc- 
tion as the Democrats were inchned to bend it in 
another. An instance of the latter kind was Mr. Ben- 
ton's expunging resolution, against which Mr. Webster 
emphatically protested. 

About this time Mr. Webster was entertaining 
thoughts of retiring, for a while at least, from public 
life. As he said in a letter to a friend, he had not for 
fourteen years had leisure to attend to his private 
affairs or to become acquainted by travel with his 
own country. This period had not, however, been 
entirely free from professional work. It was seldom 
that Mr. Webster took part in criminal trials, but in 
this department of legal practice he showed himself 
qualified to take rank with the greatest advocates that 
have ever addressed a jury. His speech for the prose- 
cution, on the trial of the murderers of Captain Joseph 
White, at Salem, in August, 1830, has been pro- 
nounced equal to the finest speeches of Lord Erskine. 
In the autumn of 1824, while driving in a chaise with 
his wife from Sandwich to Boston, he stopped at the 
'beautiful farm of Captain John Thomas, by the sea- 
shore at Marshfield. For the next seven years his 
'family passed their summers at this place as guests 
'of Captain Thomas ; and as the latter was growing old 
and willing to be eased of the care of the farm, Mr. 
Webster bought it of him in the autumn of 1831. 
Captain Thomas continued to live there, until his 
death in 1837, as Mr. Webster's guest. For the latter 
it became the favourite home whither he retired in the 
intervals of public life. It was a place, he said, where 
he " could go out every day in the year and see some- 
thing new." Mr. Webster was very fond of the sea. 



39^ DANIEL WEBSTER 

He had also a passion for country life, for all the sights 
and sounds of the farm, for the raising of fine animals, 
as well as for hunting and fishing. The earlier years 
of Mr. Webster's residence at Marshfield, and of his 
service in the United States Senate, witnessed some 
serious events in his domestic life. Death removed 
his wife, January 21, 1828, and his brother Ezekiel, 
April 10, 1829. In December, 1829, he married Miss 
Caroline Le Roy, daughter of a wealthy merchant in 
New York. Immediately after this second marriage 
came the " Reply to Hayne." The beginning of a 
new era in his private life coincided with the begin- 
ning of a new era in his career as a statesman. After 
1830 Mr. Webster was recognized as one of the great- 
est powers in the nation, and it seemed natural that 
the presidency should be offered to such a man. His 
talents, however, were not those of a party leader. 
He was always too independent. The earliest elec- 
tion at which he could have been a candidate for the 
presidency was that of 1832, and then there could be s 
no doubt that Mr. Clay represented much more com- 
pletely than Mr. Webster the doctrines of paternal 
government opposed by President Jackson. In the 
helter-skelter scramble of 1836 the legislature of Mas- 
sachusetts nominated Mr. Webster, and he received 
the electoral vote of that state alone. The newly 
formed Whig party was inclined to withhold its true 
leaders and put forward a western soldier. General 
Harrison, in the hope of turning to their own uses 
the same kind of unreflecting popular enthusiasmi 
which had carried General Jackson to the White 
House. In this policy, aided by the commercial dis- 
tress which began in 1837, they succeeded in 1840.1 



AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 399 

Mr. Webster then accepted the office of Secretary of 
State in the Harrison- Tyler administration, and soon 
showed himself as able in diplomacy as in other de- 
partments of statesmanship. A complication of diffi- 
culties with Great Britain seemed to be bringing us 
to the verge of war. There was the long-standing 
dispute about the northeastern boundary, which had 
not been adequately defined by the treaty of 1783, and 
along with the renewal of this controversy there came 
up the cases of McLeod and the steamer Caroline^ the 
slave-ship Creole, and all the manifold complications 
which these cases involved. The Oregon question, 
too, was looming in the background. In disen- 
tangling these difficulties, Mr. Webster showed rare 
tact and discretion. He was fortunately helped by 
the change of ministry in England, which transferred 
the management of foreign affairs from the hands of 
Lord Palmerston to those of Lord Aberdeen. Ed- 
ward Everett was then in London, and Mr. Webster 
secured his appointment as minister to Great Britain. 
In response to this appointment. Lord Ashburton, 
whose friendly feeling toward the United States was 
known to every one, was sent over on a special mis- 
sion to confer with Mr. Webster ; and the result was 
the Ashburton treaty of 1842, by which an arbitrary 
and conventional line was adopted for the northeastern j 
boundary, while the loss thereby suffered by the states 
of Maine and Massachusetts was to be indemnified 
by the United States. It was also agreed that Great 
Britain and the United States should each keep its 
own squadron to watch the coast of Africa for the 
suppression of the slave-trade, and that in this good 
work each nation should separately enforce its own 



400 DANIEL WEBSTER 

laws. This clause of the treaty was known as the 
"cruising convention." The old grievance of the 
impressment of seamen, which had been practically 
abolished by the glorious victories of American frig- 
ates in the War of 1812-1815, was now formally 
ended by Mr. Webster's declaration to Lord Ashbur- 
ton that henceforth American vessels would not sub- 
mit themselves to be searched. Henceforth the 
enforcement of the so-called " right of search " by a 
British ship would be regarded by the United States 
as a casus belli. When all the circumstances are con- 
sidered, this Ashburton treaty shows that Mr. Web- 
ster's powers as a diplomatist were of a high order. 
In the hands of an ordinary statesman, the affair 
might easily have ended in a war ; but his manage- 
ment was so dexterous that, as we now look back 
upon the negotiation, we find it hard to realize that 
there was any real danger. Perhaps there could be 
no more conclusive proof, or more satisfactory meas- 
ure, of his success. 

While these important negotiations were going on, 
great changes had come over the political horizon. 
There had been a quarrel between the Northern and 
Southern sections of the Whig party, and on the nth 
of September, 1841, all the members of President Ty- 
ler's cabinet, except Mr. Webster, resigned. It seems 
to have been believed by many of the Whigs that a 
unanimous resignation on the part of the cabinet 
would force President Tyler to resign. The idea 
came from a misunderstanding of the British custom 
in similar cases, and it is an incident of great interest 
to the student of American history; but there was 
not the slightest chance that it should be realized. 



AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 401 

Had there been any such chance, Mr. Webster de- 
feated it by staying at his post in order to finish the 
treaty with Great Britain. The Whigs were inclined 
to attribute his conduct to unworthy motives, and no 
sooner had the treaty been signed, on August 9, 1842, 
than the newspapers began calHng upon him to re- 
sign. The treaty was ratified in the Senate by a vote 
of thirty-nine to nine, but it had still to be adopted 
by Parliament, and much needless excitement was 
occasioned on both sides of the ocean by the discov- 
ery of an old map in Paris, sustaining the British 
view of the northeastern boundary, and another in 
London, sustaining the American view. Mr. Web- 
ster remained at his post in spite of popular clam- 
our, until he knew the treaty to be quite safe. In the 
hope of driving him from the cabinet, the Whigs in 
Massachusetts held a convention and declared that 
President Tyler was no longer a member of their 
party. On a visit to Boston, Mr. Webster made a 
noble speech in Faneuil Hall, September 30, 1842, 
in the course of which he declared that he was neither 
to be coaxed nor driven into an action which in his 
own judgment was not conducive to the best interests 
of the country. He knew very well that by such 
independence he was likely to injure his chances for 
nomination to the presidency. He knew that a move- 
ment in favour of Mr. Clay had begun in Massachu- 
setts, and that his own course was adding greatly to 
the impetus of that movement. But his patriotism 
rose superior to all personal considerations. In May, 
1843, having seen the treaty firmly established, he 
resigned the secretaryship and returned to the prac- 
tice of his profession in Boston. In the canvass of 



402 DANIEL WEBSTER 

1844 he supported Mr, Clay in a series of able 
speeches. On Mr. Choate's resignation, early in 1845, 
Mr. Webster was reelected to the Senate. The two 
principal questions of Mr. Polk's administration re- 
lated to the partition of Oregon and the difHculties 
which led to the war with Mexico. The Democrats 
declared that we must have the whole of Oregon up to 
the parallel of 50° 40', although the 49th parallel had 
already been suggested as a compromise line. In a very 
able speech at Faneuil Hall, Mr. Webster advocated 
the adoption of this compromise. The speech was 
widely read in England and on the continent of Europe, 
and Mr. Webster followed it up with a private letter 
to Mr. Macgregor of Glasgow, expressing a wish that 
the British government might see fit to offer the 49th 
parallel as a boundary line. The letter was shown 
to Lord Aberdeen, who adopted the suggestion, and 
the dispute accordingly ended in the partition of 
Oregon between the United States and Great Britain. 
During the operations on the Texas frontier, which 
brought on war with Mexico, Mr. Webster was absent 
from Washington. In the summer of 1847 ^^ travelled 
through the Southern states, and was everywhere re- 
ceived with much enthusiasm. He opposed the prose- 
cution of the war for the sake of acquiring more ij 
territory, because he foresaw that such a policy must 
speedily lead to a dangerous agitation of the slavery 
question. The war brought General Zachary Taylor 1 
into the foreground as a candidate for the presidency, 
and some of the Whig managers actually proposed to 
nominate Mr. Webster as Vice-president on the samei 
ticket with General Taylor. He indignantly refused: 
to accept such a proposal; but Mr. Clay's defeat in 



AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 403 

1844 had made many Whigs afraid to take him again 
as a candidate, Mr. Webster was thought to be al- 
together too independent, and there was a feeling 
that General Taylor was the most available candidate 
and the only one who could supplant Mr. Clay. These 
circumstances led to Taylor's nomination, which Mr. 
Webster at first declined to support. He disapproved 
of soldiers as Presidents, and characterized the nomi- 
nation as "one not fit to be made." At the same time 
he was far from ready to support Mr. Van Buren and 
the Free-soil party, yet in his situation some decided 
action was necessary. Accordingly, in his speech at 
Marshfield, September i, 1848, he declared that, as 
the choice was really between General Taylor and 
General Cass, he should support the former. It has 
been contended that in this Mr. Webster made a 
great mistake, and that his true place in this canvass 
would have been with the Free-soil party. He had 
always been opposed to the further extension of 
slavery ; but it is to be borne in mind that he looked 
with dread upon the rise of an antislavery party that 
should be supported only in the Northern states. 
Whatever tended to array the North and the South in 
opposition to each other, Mr. Webster wished espe- 
cially to avoid. The ruling purpose of his life was to 
do what he could to prevent the outbreak of a con- 
flict that might end in the disruption of the Union; 
and it may well have seemed that there was more 
safety in sustaining the Whig party in electing its 
candidate by the aid of Southern votes, than in help- 
ing into life a new party that should be purely sectional. 
At the same time, this cautious policy soon came to 
involve an amount of concession to Southern demands 



404 DANIEL WEBSTER 

far greater than the rapidly growing antislavery senti- 
ment in the Northern states would readily tolerate. 
No doubt Mr. Webster's policy in 1848 pointed logi- 
cally toward his last great speech, March 7, 1850, in 
which he supported Mr. Clay's elaborate compromises 
for disposing of the difficulties which had grown out 
of the vast extension of territory consequent upon the 
Mexican War. This speech aroused intense indigna- 
tion at the North, and especially in Massachusetts. It 
was regarded by many people as a deliberate sacrifice 
of principle to policy. In order to secure the admis- 
sion of California to the Union as a free state, it had 
been thought necessary to make some grave conces- 
sions to the Southerners, and among these concessions 
was the fugitive slave law, to which Mr. Webster, out 
of his overmastering desire to serve the Union and 
avoid Civil War, felt himself obliged to yield a reluc- 
tant consent. It was the saddest moment in his 
career, and covered him with obloquy such as has 
sufficed in many minds to dim and obscure his great 
fame. For ordinary men to succumb under the stress 
of Southern bluster and dictation might seem pardon- 
able ; but it was felt that Daniel Webster should have 
been capable of better things. The swelling tide of 
popular sentiment in Massachusetts found expression 
in the pathetic but terrible sermon of Theodore 
Parker, preached just after Webster's death. Let us 
listen, after these fifty years, to the words of the 
preacher. " Do men now mourn for him, the great 
man eloquent.? I put on sackcloth long ago. I 
mourned when he spoke the speech of the Seventh 
of March. I mourned for him when the fugitive 
slave bill passed Congress, . . . when the kidnap- 



AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 405 

pers first came to Boston, . . . when Ellen Craft fled 
to my house for shelter and for succour, and for the 
first time in all my life I armed this hand. ... I 
mourned when the court-house was hung in chains; 
when Thomas Sims, from his dungeon, sent out his 
petition for prayers, and the churches did not dare 
to pray. I mourned when that poor outcast in yonder 
dungeon sent for me to visit him, and when I took 
him by the hand which Daniel Webster was chaining 
in that hour. I mourned for Webster when we prayed 
our prayer and sang our psalm on Long Wharf in the 
morning's gray. I mourned then ; I shall not cease 
to mourn. The flags will be removed from the streets, 
the cannon will sound their other notes of joy; but for 
me, I shall go mourning all my days. I shall refuse 
to be comforted. O Webster! Webster! would God 
that I had died for thee ! " 

There is no sense in which these words of the grreat 
scholar and preacher find a ready response in the 
hearts of all of us to-day. When we look only at the 
simple fact that the demon of slavery had conjured 
American politics into such a hopeless coil that a head 
so clear and a heart so kind as Daniel Webster's could 
for a moment be beguiled into making terms with it, 
our feeling is likely to be that which Parker expressed 
with such intensity. But is such a feeling really just 
to Webster? Is it the kind of feeling which the his- 
torian ought to entertain toward him ? I think not. 
When Mr. Parker published his sermon, a few months 
afterward, he said in his preface that he was not so 
vain as to fancy that he had never been mistaken in 
his judgments upon Mr. Webster's actions or motives; 
the next generation would be better able to judge that 



4o6 DANIEL WEBSTER 

# 

statesman than his own contemporaries. And curi- 
ously enough, Mr. Parker added, by way of illustration, 
" Thomas Hutchinson and John Adams are better 
known now than at the day of their death ; five and 
twenty years hence they will both be better known 
than at present." Of course the maker of this 
prophecy could not have dreamed of such a revolution 
as has since overtaken Hutchinson's reputation in the 
eyes of enlightened critics. The grand old Tory gov- 
ernor we no longer scout as a turncoat and traitor, 
but we honour him for the conscientious steadfastness 
with which he pursued a policy which we nevertheless 
pronounce mistaken. In Webster's case I believe we 
may go farther, and call his Seventh of March speech 
not only brave and honest, but statesmanlike and 
sound. When political passion finds free vent, it is 
apt to ascribe to men the lowest of motives. So Mr. 
Webster was accused of sacrificing his convictions and 
truckling to the South, in order to obtain Southern 
support for the presidency. But a comprehensive 
survey of his political career renders such an interpre- 
tation highly improbable. His conduct in remaining 
in Mr. Tyler's cabinet was one of the capital instances 
of moral courage to be found in American history; 
and his habitual independence of party was not the 
sort of thing that is wont to characterize timid seekers 
after the presidency. That Mr. Webster strongly 
wished to be President is not to be denied; but his 
mental attitude was the proud one that rather claimed 
it as a right than asked it as a favour. It was like the 
feeling of the soldier whose unexampled services have 
earned the right to assume the weightiest responsibility 
in the widest field of action. I do not believe that 



AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 407 

Mr. Webster ever sacrificed his convictions to selfish 
or unworthy motives. That he now and then sacri- 
ficed certain convictions to certain other convictions, 
when he felt himself driven to such a bitter alternative, 
I would freely admit ; but that is a very different thing. 
In 1850 he subordinated his feelings about slavery, 
just as in 1828 he had subordinated his views on the 
tariff to the paramount necessity of saving the Union. 
In the later instance, as in the earlier, there was immi- 
nent danger of nullification or secession on the part of 
South Carolina; and in 1850 there was added danger 
that the Gulf states might follow the lead of their im- 
placable sister. Compromise seemed necessary. We 
have seen that, as in 1833, Mr. Webster did not always 
approve of compromises ; but there was a special 
reason for supporting those of Mr. Clay in 1850. They 
seemed to Mr. Webster a conclusive settlement of the 
slavery question. The whole territory of the United 
States, as he said, was now covered with compromises, 
and the future destiny of every part, so far as the legal 
introduction of slavery was concerned, seemed to be 
decided. As for the regions to the west of Texas, he 
believed that slavery was ruled out by natural condi- 
tions of soil and climate, so that it was not necessary 
to protect them by a Wilmot proviso. As for the 
fugitive slave law, it was simply a provision for carry- 
ing into effect a clause of the Constitution, without 
which that instrument could never have been adopted 
and in the frequent infraction of which Mr. Webster 
saw a serious danger to the continuance of the Union. 
He therefore accepted the fugitive slave law as one 
feature in the proposed system of compromises ; but in 
accepting it he offered amendments which, if they had 



4o8 DANIEL WEBSTER 

been adopted, would have gone far toward depriving it 
of its most obnoxious and irritating features. By 
adopting these measures of compromise, Mr. Webster 
beHeved that the extension of slavery would have been 
given its final limit, that the North would by reason 
of its free labour increase in preponderance over the 
South, and that by and by the institution of slavery, 
hemmed in and denied further expansion, would die a 
natural death. That these views were mistaken, the 
events of the next ten years showed only too plainly ; 
but how easy it is to be wise after the event, and how 
completely the result of a great struggle, such as our 
Civil War, casts into shadow the thoughts and motives 
of men whose lives were ended before it began, can 
only be well understood by the student whose view is 
accustomed to range far and wide over the field of 
history. In order to understand Mr. Webster's posi- 
tion, we must put ourselves back, in imagination, to 
that time when the doing away with that relic of bar- 
barism, negro slavery, seemed as far off as the doing 
away with its twin sister, protectionism, seems to many 
of us to-day. Looking at Mr. Webster's acts in such 
a spirit, there can be no doubt that the compromises 
which he sustained had their practical value in post- 
poning the inevitable conflict for ten years, during 
which the relative strength of the North was increasing, 
and a younger generation was growing up less tolerant 
of slavery and more ready to discard palliatives and 
achieve a radical cure. So far as Mr. Webster's moral 
attitude was concerned, although he was not prepared 
for the bitter hostility that his speech provoked in 
many quarters, he must nevertheless have known that 
it was quite as likely to injure him at the North as to 



AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 409 

gain support for him in the South ; and his resolute 
adoption of a poHcy that he regarded as national 
rather than sectional was really an instance of high 
moral courage. It was, however, a concession that 
did violence to his sentiments of humanity, and the 
pain and uneasiness it occasioned is visible in some of 
his latest utterances. 

On President Taylor's death, July 9, 1850, Mr. 
Webster became President Fillmore's Secretary of 
State. An earnest attempt was made, on the part 
of his friends, to secure his nomination for the presi- 
dency in 1852 ; but on the first ballot in the conven- 
tion he received only 29 votes, while there were 131 
for General Scott, and 133 for Mr. Fillmore. The 
efforts of Mr. Webster's adherents succeeded only in 
giving the nomination to Scott. The result was a 
grave disappointment to Mr. Webster. He refused to 
support the nomination, and took no part in the cam- 
paign. His health was now rapidly failing. He left 
Washington, September 8, for the last time, and re- 
turned to Marshfield, which he never left again, except 
on September 20, for a brief call upon his physician 
in Boston. 

On the 24th of October, 1852, he died, and on the next 
day flags in all towns that had caught the sad news 
were at half-mast. I was a little boy then, and had 
never been in Boston or seen Mr. Webster; but I 
could not forget that day if I were to live a thousand 
years. Daniel Webster was dead. A godlike pres- 
ence had gone from us. Life seemed smaller, lonelier, 
and meaner. I well remember catching myself won- 
dering how the sun could rise and the daily events of 
life go on without Daniel Webster. 



INDEX 



Aberdeen, Lord, 400, 402. 

Adams, John, urges appointment of 
Washington as commander-in-chief, 
70-71 ; letter from, to Charles Lee, 
75; jealousy between Hamilton and, 
136-137, 174; death of, 181; aristo- 
cratic notion of location of political 
power, 223 ; Webster's eulogy on, 
380. 

Adams, John Quincy, 215, 311 ; as 
Monroe's Secretary of State upholds 
Jackson's course in Florida, 257 ; 
elected President, 281-282; "prince 
and protagonist of mugwumps," 322; 
and policy of internal improvements, 
323; as a member of Congress in 
President Tyler's administration, 358. 

Adams, Samuel (the elder), 17-18. 

Adams, Samuel (the younger), 152, 154, 
176; British opinion of, 5; elected a 
member of the legislature, 31 ; at- 
tempt to arrest and send to England 
for trial, 32 ; demands removal of 
soldiers from Boston, 35 ; replies to 
Hutchinson's defence of supremacy 
of Parliament, 36-37; Hutchinson's 
criticisms of, in letters to Thomas 
Whately, 37 ; carries resolutions 
looking to a Continental Congjress, 
101 ; as a Federalist, 168-169. 

Aix-la-Chapelle, treaty of, 20. 

Alabama, admission of, to Union, 271. 

Albany Congress of 1754, 23, 200. 

Alien and sedition laws, the, 135-136, 
174, 211-213. 

Ambrister, Robert, 256, 257, 261-262. 

'American Notes," Dickens's, 275. 

'American system," the, 323, 382-383. 

\ndre. Major, Hamilton's acquaintance- 
ship with, 112. 

411 



Annapolis convention of 1786, 117-118, 

196. 

Anti-federalism, the beginning of, 117, 
168; Governor George Clinton a 
champion of, 118-II9, 124; Me- 
lanchthon Smith defends, 125; the 
Waterloo of, 125. 

Antinomians, 365. 

" Anything to beat Van Buren," 349. 

Arbuthnot, Alexander, 256, 257, 261- 
262. 

"Aristocracy of office," theory of an, 
289. 

Armstrong, Secretary of War, 241, 245. 

Arnold, Benedict, comparative dignity 
of character of, beside that of Charles 
Lee, 97-98. 

Ashburton treaty, 399-400. 

Assumption of state debts by federal 
government, 1 27- 1 30; Madison op- 
posed to, 208-209. 



B 



Badger, George E., 356. 

Bancroft, George, 23. 

Bank, National, established by Hamil- 
ton and Gouverneur Morris, 114, 
133; opposed by Madison, 209; 
Jackson's opposition to and attacks 
on, 235, 236, 302-303 ; removal of 
deposits from, 304, 336-337 ; com- 
ments on destruction of, 311 ; ques- 
tion of rechartering in 181 1, 329; 
Tyler's opposition to, 336-338; 
President Tyler and, 352-353; per- 
manent defeat of, 357. 

Bank, Fiscal, 353-356. 

Banking, wildcat, in early New Eng- 
land, 13-22; enormous development 
of, before panic of 1837, 346. See 
Bank, National. 



412 



INDEX 



Barre, town of, originally named Hutch- 
inson, 47. 

Barrington, Lord, Charles Lee's letter 
to, 71-72. 

Barry, W. T., 286. 

Bayard, Richard H., 353. 

Belcher, Governor Jonathan, 14-20. 

Bell, John, 356. 

Bellamy, Dr. Joseph, 374. 

Bennet Street Grammar School, Boston, 
10, 47. 

Bentham, Jeremy, 44. 

Benton, Thomas H., 283, 302, 325, 334, 

336, 337. 338, 360, 383. 389. 392; 
early affray with Jackson, 241-242; 
persistency in having resolution of 
censure on Jackson expunged, 305— 
306. 
Bernard, Governor Francis, 25, 28, 30, 

31. 34- 
Berrien, J. M., 285, 292. 
Bibles, old ladies in Connecticut hide, on 

election of Jefferson, 175. 
Birney, James, 350. 

Blair, Francis Preston, 295, 325, 336, 360. 
Blount, William, 231. 
" Boiling Water," Mohawk nickname of 

Charles Lee, 60. 
Boone, Daniel, 223. 
Boott, Dr. Francis, 390 n. 
Boston Massacre, the, 34-35. 
Botts, John Minor, 354. 
Brack enridge, H. M., 280. 
Branch, John, 285, 292. 
Braddock's defeat, 58 ; recalled by 

Madison as a boy, 189. 
Brent, Richard, 329, 338. 
"Brother Jonathan," Trumbull the orig- 
inal, 12. 
Brown, Rev. Francis, 374. 
Bryant, William Cullen, 309. 
Bunbury, Sir William, 63. 
Banker Hill orations, Webster's, 380. 
Burgoyne, General, as a target for silly 

remarks by American historians, 5; 

Charles Lee in Portugal with, 63; 

Charles Lee's correspondence in 

America with, 74. 
Burke, Edmund, at famous meeting of 

privy council, 44; Charles Lee writes 



to, 69 ; " Letters on a Regicide 
Peace," 166. 

Burr, Aaron, 138, 175; elected Vice- 
president, 139; prevented by Hamil- 
ton from becoming governor of New 
York, 140; duel with Hamilton, 140; 
visit to Andrew Jackson, 240. 

Butler, Colonel Edward, 290-291. 



" Cabbage-planting enterprise," Charles 
Lee derides expedition against 
Louisburg as a, 60. 

Cabinet, Hamilton and Jefferson in 
Washington's, 125, 167; Jackson's 
tirst, 285; the "kitchen," 286, 295; 
Jackson's second, 293-294; resigna- 
tion of members of Tyler's, 356, 
400-401. 

Calhoun, elected Vice-president, 281; 
reelected, 285; misrepresented to 
Jackson, 291—292; succeeds Hayne 
in Senate, 298. 

Campbell, G. W., unpublished letter of 
Jackson's to, 259-264. 

Capitalists, Hamilton aimed at alliance 
of government with, 130, See Plu- 
tocracy. 

Capitals, state, reason for location of, 
162. 

Carlyle, Thomas, on Daniel Webster, 

389. 
Carr, Dabney, 163, 180. 
Cass, Lewis, 294. 
Censure, resolution of, on President 

Jackson, 305-306, 338, 396. 
Charleston, Charles Lee at battle of, 77- 

78. 
Chatham, Lord, admiration of Ameri- i 

cans for, 4. 
Cherokee Indians, disputes between 

Georgia and, 296. 
Chesapeake, affair of the, 214. 
Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, origin of, J 

196. 
Choate, Rufus, 353, 402. 
Chotzim, Charles Lee at battle of, 66. 
Church, disestablishment of, in Virginia,,] 

159-160, 190-191. 



INDEX 



413 



Cities, growth of, in United States, 309, 

344- 

Civil service, previous to Jackson's 
administration, 287-288; Jackson's 
treatment of, 288-290; in Harrison- 
Tyler administration, 350-351. 

Oay, Henry, chosen Speaker of the 
House of Representatives, 215; be- 
ginning of feud between Jackson 
and, 258, 279; candidacy of, for pres- 
idency, 281; becomes J. Q. Adams's 
Secretary of State, 283; charged with 
making a bargain with Adams, 283- 
284; forces United States Bank ques- 
tion to the foreground, 302; candi- 
date for presidency a second time, 
303; carries resolution of censure on 
Jackson, 305, 338; election of Harri- 
son considered a victory for, 35 1; 
struggle with Tyler, 351-35S. 

Qeveland, Grover, 174-175. 

Qinton, De Witt, 216. 

Qinton, George, as an Anti-federalist, 
118-119, 168; elected Vice-presi- 
dent, 215. 

Qinton, Sir Henry, succeeds Lord Howe 
in America, 87; possibility of an un- 
derstanding with Lee at Monmouth, 

92-93- 

Coddington, William, 8. 

Commerce, difficulties in regulating inter- 
state, at close of Revolution, 196-198. 

Compromise act of 1833, 358. 

Connecticut compromise, the, 202. 

Constitution of United States, Madison's 
share in framing, 122. 

"Constitution not a Compact between 
Sovereign States," Webster's, 393- 

394- 
Conway, Thomas, 56. 
Conway cabal, the, 79, 87. 
Cooper, James Fennimore, 309. 
Cooper, Dr. Myles, 69, 108. 
Cornwallis, Lord, silliness of remarks by 

some historians as applied to, 5 ; in 

Virginia, 163. 
"Corporal's guard, the," 357. 
Cotton, John, 7. 
Crawford, W. H., 253, 280 n., 281, 286, 

383. 



Creeks, Jackson's campaign against, 

243-244. 
" Crime and Punishment," Beccaria's, 64. 
Crimes act, the, 381. 
Crisis of 1837, 343-348. 
Crittenden, John J., 356. 
Crockett, David, 244, 
Cruger, Nicholas, 104. 
"Cruising convention," the, 40c. 
Currency, decimal, devised by Jefferson 

and Gouverneur Morris, 164. 
Curtis, Benjamin, 50. 
Gushing, Thomas, receives the Whately 

letters, 39. 



D 



Dartmouth, Lord, meets Hutchinson in 
London, 47. 

Dartmouth College, Webster graduated 
from, 368. 

Dartmouth College case, the, 373-379. 

Day, James, quoted, 271 n. 

Debt, payment of national, in 1835, 344. 

Debts, of United States, at close of 
Revolution, 126, 192-193; assump- 
tion of state, 127-130; assumption 
of state, opposed by Madison, 208- 
209. 

Declaration of Independence drawn up 
by Jefferson, 155-157. 

De Kalb, 56. 

Democrats, origin of the, 324-325. 

" Demos KraUo " principle, the, 337, 

395- 

Deposits, removal of, from United States 
Bank, 304, 336-337 ; results of re- 
moval of, 346. 

Dickens, Charles, comments on America, 

275- 
Dickinson, Charles, Jackson's duel with, 

239- 
Disestablishment of Church in Virginia, 

1 59- 1 60 ; Madison's connection with, 

190-191. 
Dix, John A., extract from letter of, 280 n. 
" Domestic Manners of the Americans," 

Mrs. TroUope's, 275. 
Donoughmore, Irish earls of, 7. 
Draper, Dr. Lyman, 188. 



414 



INDEX 



Dress, Webster's style of, 270, 389 n. 

Dryden, Sir Erasmus, 7. 

Duane, W. J., 304, 396. 

Duel, Charles Lee's, in Vienna, 66-67 » 
Lee declines to fight, with Steuben, 
94 ; Lee wounded by Laurens in a, 
95, ni-112; Hamilton's son killed 
in a, 139 ; the Burr-Hamilton, 140- 
141 ; Andrew Jackson's, with Avery, 
238 ; Jackson challenges General 
Scott to a, 253 ; between John Ran- 
dolph and Henry Clay, 283 ; Jackson 
dies as result of a wound received in 
a, 308 ; Randolph challenges Web- 
ster to a, 372. 

Duels, plan to kill Hamilton by a series 
of, 117; discredited in Northern 
states as a result of Hamilton's 
death, 141 ; caused by the " Mrs. 
Eaton" episode, 292. 



Eastman, Abigail, 367. 

Eaton, John H., 285, 290, 292. 

Eaton, Mrs. John H., episode of, 290- 

294. 
Eliot, Rev, Andrew, 30. 
Eliot school, Boston, originally named 

the Hutchinson, 47. 
Ellsworth, William, 190. 
Embargo, Jefferson's, 214-215, 278,322; 

Webster's pamphlet criticising, 369- 

370 ; jingle about the, 369 n. 
England, yeomanry and country squires 

of, compared with French classes, 

145-148 ; arrogance of, in War of 

181 2, 247-248. 
Entail, system of, in Virginia, abolished, 

157-158. 
" Era of good feeling," the, 279. 
Erie Canal, results of completion of, 344. 
Everett, Edward, 399. 
Ewing, Thomas, 353, 356. 
Exeter Academy, Webster at, 367. 



"Farmer Refuted, The," Hamilton's, 
107-108. 



Farragut, David, sent to South Carolina 
by Jackson, 298. 

"Federalist," the, 122-123, 188, 204. 

Federalist party, building up of, 114- 
125, 168; victory of, over Anti- 
federalists, 125 ; cause of downfall 
of, 134 ; absorbed by Republican 
party, 207, 215. 

Fiscal corporation bill, 353-355. 

Rorida, base for British operations in 
War of 1 81 2, 245 ; Jackson drives 
British from, 245-246; in 1816 be- 
comes a nest of outlaws, 253-254 ; 
invaded by Jackson in 181 8, 255- 
257 ; purchased by United States 
from Spain, 258. 

Floyd, John, 303, 334. 

Foote, Samuel A., 386. 

Foote's resolutions, 297, 386-387. 

Force Bill, the, 335-33^, 39 1- 

Fort Bowyer, British defeat at, 245, 

Forward, Walter, 356. 

France, peasantry of, compared with 
yeomanry of England, 145-148; 
Jefferson's sojourn in, 1 64-165 ; Jack- 
son settles American difficulties with^ 
307-308. 

Frankland, Sir Harry, house of, 28. 

Franklin, Benjamin, a delegate to Albany 
Congress, 23 ; comes into possession 
of Whately's correspondence, 38- 
39 ; abused by Wedderburn before 
privy council, 44-45 ; dismissed from 
postmaster-generalship, 45 ; descrip- 
tion of Earl of Loudoun, 60 ; letter 
from, to Charles Lee, 76 ; a proto- 
type of the " franklins " of England, 
146-147 ; Jefferson succeeds, in 
France, 164. 

Franklins, the, in England, 146. 

Free trade speech, Webster's, 382-383. 

Fugitive slave law, Webster's attitude 
on, 404-409. 

Fulton, Robert, 271. 



" Gag resolution," the, 342. 
Gage, Thomas, serves under Braddock 
in America as lieutenant-colonel, 



INDEX 



415 



58; in battle of Ticonderoga, 61; 
takes command in Boston, 46, loi. 

Gallatin, Albert, 223, 

Gallicism, Jefferson's so-called, I55-I57. 

Gantt, Colonel Thomas Tasker, 259, 
264 ; Mrs. E. B. Lee's letter to, 
quoted, 292 n., 298 n. 

Gates, Horatio, first acquaintance of 
Charles Lee with, 58; Charles Lee's 
friendship with, 70 ; Hamilton re- 
gains Washington's troops from, ill. 

George HI., accession of, to throne, 
25-26. 

Georgia, disputes with Cherokee Ind- 
ians in, 296. 

Giles, William E., 329, 338. 

Girdlestone, Dr. Thomas, on Charles 
Lee as the author of " Letters of 
Junius," 96-97. 

Gladstone, W. E., end of army purchase 
system by, 60. 

Gore, Christopher, 369. 

Gower, Lord President of privy council, 
44. 

Granger, Francis, 356. 

Grayson, William, 206. 

Great Britain, arrogance of, in War of 
181 2, 247-248. 

Green, Duff, 286, 295. 

Greene, D. H., quoted concerning rela- 
tionship of Charles and Robert E. 
Lee, 57 n. 

Greene, Nathanael, mentions Hamilton 
to Washington, 109. 

Gridley, Jeremiah, 25, 26. 

Griswold, Roger, 242. 



H 



Hallowell, Briggs, 28. 

Hamilton, Alexander, delivers patriotic 
address when seventeen years of 
age, 103; birth and family of, 104; 
enters King's College, 106; on 
Washington's staff, 109-112; mar- 
ries Elizabeth Schuyler, 113; admit- 
ted to bar in Albany, 113 ; aids in 
establishment of Bank of North 
America, 114, 133; delegate to Con- 
gress in 1782, 114; first famous law 



case, 116-117; delegate to conven- 
tions at Annapolis and Philadelphia, 
1 17-1 18; joint author with Madison 
of "Federalist," 122-123, 188, 204; 
wins New York over to ratifying fed- 
eral Constitution, 123-125; Wash- 
ington's Secretary of Treasury, 125; 
proposal for federal assumption of 
state debts, 127; aims to insure sta- 
bility of government by alliance with 
capitalists, 130; an advocate of pro- 
tective tariff, 132; feud with Jeffer- 
son, 134-135, 167-168; jealousy 
between John Adams and, 136-137, 
174; killed by Burr in duel, 140. 
Hamilton, Philip, killed in a duel, 

139- 

Hamiltonians, comparison of, with 
Tories, 170-173. 

Hanging Rock, Jackson present at fight 
of, 229. 

Harcourt, Lieutenant-colonel, capture 
of Charles Lee by, 81-82. 

Hard cider campaign, the, 349-350. 

Harrison, William Henry, 206, 242; 
birth and early career of, 340 ; po- 
litical life, 341 ; second nomination 
for presidency, 349; elected Presi- 
dent, 350; death of, 351. 

" Harry of the West," 278. 

Hartford convention, the, 247, 278, 322, 

371- 

Harvard College, Thomas Hutchinson 
at, II; versus the backwoods, as 
illustrated by J. Q. Adams and Jack- 
son, 284. 

Hawke, Lord Edward, 12. 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 309. 

Hayne, Robert Y., 387. 

" Hayne, Reply to." See " Reply to 
Hayne." 

Hearts of Oak, Hamilton a member of 
the, 109. 

Heath, General, 79-80. 

Henry, Patrick, British opinion of, 5; 
as an Anti-federalist, 168, 205, 206, 
372; advocates extension of powers 
of federal government, 208. 

Hermitage, the, Jackson's home at, 
308. 



4i6 



INDEX 



Hervey, Lady, a cornet in British regi- 
ment from infancy, 57-58. 

Hill, Isaac, 286. 

Holmes, O. W., 309. 

Holy Alliance, Webster's speech against, 
381-382. 

Holy Ground, the, 244. 

Houston, Samuel, 244. 

Howe, Lord, death of, in battle of Ti- 
conderoga, 61. 

Howe, Sir William, and Charles Lee, 
83-86. 

Hume, David, Charles Lee's epistle to, 
64-65. 

Hutchinson, Anne, 7-8. 

Hutchinson, Thomas, ancestry of, 7-10; 
childhood of, lo-i i ; at Harvard, 
II-12; marriage, 12; beginning of 
public life, 13; member of General 
Court, 13-20; Speaker of House, 
20-21 ; member of council, 22; resi- 
dence on Milton Hill, 22-23; ^P" 
pointed judge of probate and justice 
of common pleas, 23 ; loss of wife, 
23; appointed lieutenant-governor, 
24; chief justice, 25; house of, 
wrecked by a mob, 30 ; appointed 
governor of Massachusetts, 35 ; and 
the Boston Massacre, 34-35; mas- 
terly statement of doctrine of su- 
premacy of Parliament, 36; adjusts 
boundary line between New York 
and Massachusetts, 37; correspond- 
ence with Thomas Whately, 37-38; 
goes to England, 46; met by Lord 
Dartmouth, 47; refuses a baronetcy, 
48; death of, 49; his character and 
intellectual powers, 49-51 ; analogy 
between case of, and Webster's, 406. 

Hutchinson Mob, the, 30-31. 

Hutchinson, town of, name changed to 
Barre, 47. 



Illinois, admission of, to Union, 271. 
Impost law of 1783, proposed, 192-193. 
Indemnification to Charles Lee, Ameri- 
can, 71-73, 78. 
" Indian War," Church's, 12. 
Indiana, admission of, to Union, 271. 



Ingham, S. D., 285, 292. 

Internal improvements, policy of, 323, 

371-372. 
" lolanthe," quoted, 319-320. 
Irving, Washington, 309. 
Izard, Ralph, on Wedderburn's abuse of 

Franklin, 45. 



Jackson, Andrew, family of, and birth, 
228-229 ; prisoner at Camden during 
Revolutionary War, 230 ; story of 
the British officer's boots, 230 ; stud- 
ies law and appointed public prose- 
cutor in North Carolina, 230 ; story 
of Mrs. Robards, 232-234 ; marriage, 
234 ; representative in Congress from 
Tennessee, 235 ; elected to Senate, 
237 ; judge in Supreme Court of 
Tennessee, 238 ; duel with Dickin- 
son, 239-240 ; in War of 181 2, 241 ; 
nicknamed "Old Hickory," 241 ; in 
Creek War, 243-245 ; appointed 
major-general, 245 ; at battle of New 
Orleans, 250-251 ; invades Florida 
in 1818, 255-256 ; beginning of feud 
with Clay, 258, 279 ; appointed gov. 
ernor of Florida, 258 ; becomes 
United States Senator, 279 ; defeated 
by J. Q. Adams for presidency, 281- 
282; defeats Adams in 1828, 285; 
death of Mrs. Jackson, 291 ; re- 
elected President, 303 ; death, 308 ; 
remarkable character of the period 
of his two presidential terms, 309; 
Webster's support of, 391-392. 

Jackson, Mrs. Andrew, death of, 291. 
See Robards, Mrs. Lewis. 

Jay, John, Hamilton first meets, 106 ; 
a delegate to Continental Congress, 
152-153 ; essays in " Federalist " by, 
204. 

Jay's treaty, 135, 209, 210, 235-236. 

Jefferson, Thomas, birth and ancestry of, 
150; marriage, 151 ; elected delegate 
to Continental Congress, 152; draws 
up Declaration of Independence, 
155-157; an active member of Vir- 
ginia legislature, 157-163; governor 



INDEX 



417 



of Virginia in 1779, 163; death of 
wife, 163; elected to Congress, 163; 
minister to France, 164-165; be- 
comes Washington's Secretary of 
State, 125, 167; Vice-president, 174; 
presidential campaign of, 174-176; 
buys the Mississippi territory of Na- 
poleon, 177; reelection to presi- 
dency, 180; death, 180; Madison's 
intimacy with, 189; responsibihty of, 
for theory of nuUitication, 212; treat- 
ment of civil service by, 287-288; 
mantle of, fell on Van Buren, 311- 
312; Webster's eulogy on, 380. 

Jeffersonians, comparison of, with Eng- 
lish Liberals, 170-173. 

Johnson, George, letter from, to Charles 
Lee, 88. 

Johnson, Richard, 342, 

Johnson, Sir William, 59. 

Judges, election of, instead of appoint- 
ment, a crying abomination, 272. 



K 



Kant, Immanuel, on Wedderburn's 
abuse of Franklin, 45. 

Kendall, Amos, 286, 295, 304. 

Kentucky resolutions of 1798, 174,211- 
213. 

King Philip's War, 9. 

King, Rufus, 203, 278, 322. 

King's College, Dr. Myles Cooper presi- 
dent of, 69, 108; Hamilton a stu- 
dent at, 106. 

" Kitchen cabinet," Jackson's, 286 ; 
break in the, 295. 

Knox, General Henry, iii, 137. 

Knox, Dr. Hugh, 104, 105. 

Kosciuszko, in America, 56. 



Lafayette, Marquis de, 56, 88, 89; love 
of, for Hamilton, 1 1 1 ; innocent 
cause of disagreement between 
Washington and Hamilton, 112. 

Land Bank of 1740, 16-17. 

Langworthy, Edward, 66, 77. 

Lansing, John, 119. 

2 E 



Laurens, Colonel, Charles Lee's duel 
with, 95, IH-112. 

Lee, Charles, wrongly stated to be 
father of Robert E. Lee, 56-57; an- 
cestry of, 57; birth of, 57; com- 
missioned lieutenant in the British 
army, 58; m America with Brad- 
dock's army, 58 ; adopted by Mo- 
hawk tribe, 59; in Earl of Loudoun's 
expedition against Louisburg, 60 ; 
wounded in battle of Ticonderoga, 
61 ; narrow escape from assassination 
on Long Island, 62 ; return to Eng- 
land in 1 761, 63 ; with Burgoyne in 
Portugal, 63; in Poland, 66; arrives 
in America in 1773, 67; appointed 
second major-general in Continental 
army, 70; letter to Lord Barrington, 
71-72; service in Continental army, 
74-81 ; at battle of Charleston, 77- 
78; captured by British, 82; con- 
duct during captivity, 83-86 ; ex- 
changed for General Richard Pres- 
cott, 86; treason at Monmouth, 89- 
91; in disgrace, 92; death, 95; pre- 
tensions to authorship of "Letters of 
Junius," 95-97 ; Benedict Arnold a 
dignified character in comparison 
with, 97-98. 

Lee, Mrs. Elizabeth B., 259; letter from, 
to Colonel Gantt, quoted, 292 n., 
298 n. 

Lee, Henry, 206, 303. 

Lee, Richard Henry, 155, 205. 

Lee, Robert E., Charles Lee wrongly 
stated to be the father of, 56-57. 

Legare, Hugh S., 356. 

Leigh, Benjamin Watkins, 338. 

Leopard, affair of the, 214. 

Lepel, Colonel, makes his infant daugh- 
ter a cornet in British regiment, 57. 

" Letters and Times of the Tylers," 327. 

" Letters of Junius," Charles Lee pre- 
tends to authorship of, 95-97. 

" Letters on a Regicide Peace," Burke's, 
166. 

Lewis, William B., 279, 286, 292. 

Liberalists, English, chief character- 
istics of, 1 71-172. 

Lippe-Schaumburg, Count von, 63. 



4i8 



INDEX 



Literature, the blooming time of Ameri- 
can, 309. 

Little Belt, affair of the, 215. 

Livingston, Edward, 249, 293. 

Log cabin campaign, the, 349-350. 

Longfellow, H. W., 309. 

Louisburg, fortress of, 20-21; Earl of 
Loudoun's expedition against, 60. 

Louisiana purchase, 177, 321. 

Loyalists, American, hard position of, 
in history, 5-6. 

Lyon, Matthew, 242. 



M 



McCarthy, Daniel, on Charles Lee as 
author of " Letters of Junius," 96. 

McCay, Spruce, 230. 

Macdougall, Alexander, 103. 

McLane, Louis, 293-294, 304. 

McLean, John, 356. 

McMurdo, Tyler's schoolmaster, 328. 

Madison, James, 157, 168, 176; Ham- 
ilton first comes in contact with, 1 14; 
share of, in framing the Constitution, 
122 ; joint author with Hamilton of 
the " Federalist," 122-123, i^^, 204 ; 
ancestry of, and birth, 188; intimacy 
with Jefferson, 189 ; at Princeton 
College, 189 ; entrance to public life, 
190 ; delegate to Continental Con- 
gress, 191 ; member of Virginia leg- 
islature, 194; delegate to Annapolis 
and Philadelphia conventions, 198 ; 
the " Virginia plan " devised by, 
199-201 ; services in securing ratifi- 
cation of Constitution by Virginia, 
204-206 ; elected to first national 
House of Representatives, 206 ; 
leader of the opposition, 207-210; 
marriage ,'2 10; draws up Virginia res- 
olutions of 1798, 210; becomes Jef- 
ferson's Secretary of State, 213-214; 
elected President, 215 ; reelected 
President, 216 ; old age, 217 ; cause 
for dislike of Jackson, 240. 

Maine, admission of, to Union, 271. 

Mangum, Person, 341. 

Marcy, W. L., declares that " to the vic- 
tors belong the spoils," 288. 



Marshall, Chief Justice, 185, 186, 190, 

206 ; ruling of, on power of Federal 

government to acquire territory, 178; 

the Dartmouth College case before, 

376-379. 
Marshfield, Webster's home at, 397-398. 
" Martin Chuzzlewit " quoted, 275, 347. 
Maryland convention of 1776, 76-77. 
Mason, Colonel George, 157, 161, 198, 

206. 
Mason, Jeremiah, 369, 375. 
Mather, Rev. Samuel, 30. 
Maysville turnpike bill, 334. 
Mifflin, Thomas, 70. 
Milton, Hutchinson's residence in, 22- 

23. 
Mimms, Fort, massacre of, 243. 
Mississippi, admission of, to Union, 271. 
Mississippi River, free navigation of, 

177, 191-192, 199. 
Missouri, admission of, to Union, 271, 

330-332, 372. 
Missouri Compromise bill, 330-332. 
Mobile occupied by General Jackson, 

245. 
Mohawks, Charles Lee and the, 59-60. 
Monmouth Court House, battle of, 89- 

91- 

Monongahela, battle of the, 58. 

Monroe, James, 206, 322 ; elected Presi- 
dent, 278. 

Monticello, Jefferson's home at, 163, 
179-180. 

Montpelier, Madison's home at, 210, 
217. 

Morris, Gouverneur, aids in establish- 
ment of Bank of North America, 
114; subscribes to the "three-fifths 
rule," 203 ; singular views of, as to 
so-called back-country people, 221- 
222. 

Morris, Robert, lends Charles Lee 
;i^30oo, 70 ; aids in establishment of 
Bank of North America, 114. 

Morton, Major Jacob, testimony of, con- 
cerning Washington and Lee at 
Monmouth, 90 n. 

Moultrie, Colonel William, 77. 

Mugwumps, J. Q. Adams protagonist 
of, 322. 



INDEX 



419 



N 



National bank. See Bank, National. 

National Republicans, the, 324. 

Naturalization in United States, 162- 
163. 

Navigation of Mississippi, 177, 191-192, 
199. 

Navigation Acts, trouble caused in Bos- 
ton by enforcement of, 28. 

New England Confederacy, 8. 

"New England Memorial," Morton's, 
12. 

New Orleans, Jackson at, 246, 248-252 ; 
battle of, 250-251, 278. 

Newspaper, development of modern type 
of, 309. 

Non-intercourse acts, the, 215. 

Northeastern boundary question, 399- 
400. 

"Notes on Virginia," Jefferson's, 159- 
160, 164-165. 

Nullification during Jackson's adminis- 
trations, 295, 297-300, 312-313. 



O 



Ohio, admission of, to Union, 271. 

Old Corner Bookstore, Boston, William 
Hutchinson's house on site of, 8. 

" Old Hickory," Jackson receives nick- 
name of, 241. 

Oliver, Andrew, correspondence between 
Thomas Whately and, 37-38. 

Ordinance of 1787, 164, 225. 

Oregon question, the, 221, 402. 

Otis, James, 25, 74-75. 

Overton, Judge, 232, 238, 239-240, 255, 



Paine, Thomas, 64. 

Pakenham, Sir Edward, 250, 251, 

Pamphleteer, Charles Lee as a, 64-65, 

73- 

Panic of 1837, 343-348. 

Paper money, in 1690, 13; in New 
England in eighteenth century, 13- 
15, 21-22 ; issued by Continental 
Congress, 192-193 ; virulent craze 



for, in 1786, 195-196; before panic 
of 1837, 345-347- 

Parker, Theodore, sermon by, on Web- 
ster and fugitive slave law, 404- 
405. 

Parkman, Francis, 23. 

Parties, political, earliest division of 
American, 168 ; comparison of, with 
English, 170-173; division into 
Whigs and Democrats, 295 ; develop- 
ment of, to 1832, 317-325. 

Paxton, Charles, correspondence be- 
tween Thomas Whately and, 37- 
38. 

Pearl Street, Boston, originally named 
Plutchinson Street, 47. 

Pendleton, Edmund, 158, 206. 

Pensacola captured by Jackson, 257, 
260-261. 

" Pet banks," the, 305. 

Philadelphia convention of 1 787, 1 18, 
198. 

Phillips, Stephen C, 349 n. 

Pickering, Timothy, 140, 141, 223, 277, 
286, 371. 

Pinckney, Cotesworth, 137, 180, 203, 
215, 223. 

Pinckney, Thomas, 203, 223 ; candidacy 
of, for presidency, 136. 

Plutocracy, gravest danger to our country 
is a government by a, 130, 179. 

" Pocket veto," Jackson's, 296. 

Poland, Charles Lee in, 66. 

Potomac Company, the, 196. 

Pownall, Governor Thomas, 24-25. 

Presbyterian junto, the, 103. 

Prescott, General Richard, Charles Lee 
exchanged for, 86. 

Prescott, W. H., 309. 

President, affair of the, 215. 

Priestley, Dr., 44, 45. 

Primogeniture, law of, in Virginia, at- 
tacked by Jefferson, 158. 

Princeton College, Hamilton applies for 
admission to, 106 ; Madison a student 
at, 189. 

Protection of American industries. See 
Tariff, protective. 

Provincialism, period of, in America, 
267-276. 



420 



INDEX 



Pulaski, Count, 56. 

Purchase system, end of, in British army, 

60. 
Putnam, Israel, in battle of Ticonderoga, 

61. 

Q 

Quincy, Josiah, 178, 249. 



Railjroads, development of, in United 

States, 309, 322-323, 344. 
Randolph, Edmund, 198, 199, 206. 
Randolph, John, 2S3, 333, 372. 
" Religious Freedom Act," Madison's, 

194-195. 
" Reply to Hayne," Webster's, 297, 312, 

387-391- 

Republican party, absorbs Federalists, 
207, 215; divided in 1824-1832 on 
questions of internal improvements, 
tariff, and national bank, 324. 

Revenue question, the, 131-133, 167, 
192-193. 

Revolution, French, 166-167. 

Rhea, John, 255. 

Richmond, state capital of Virginia re- 
moved to, 162. 

Rives, William C, 343, 353. 

Rivington, James, 108. 

Road-building, era of, in United States, 

344- 
Robards, Captain Lewis, 232-234. 
Robards, Mrs. Rachel, 232-234, 290- 

291. 
Robertson, Donald, 188. 
Robertson, James, 223. 
Robertson, William, letter from, to Dr. 

Fiske, 90 n. 
Rockingham, Lord, 31. 
Rockingham Memorial, the, 370. 
Rodney, Thomas, conversation of, with 

Charles Lee concerning " Letters of 

Junius," 95-97. 
Rousseau, Jefferson not in same class 

with, 154. 
Rush, Dr. Benjamin, correspondence of, 

with Charles Lee, 76, 79. 
Rutledge, Edward, 76, 153, 203. 



Sargent, Lucius Manlius, 369 n. 

Schuyler, Elizabeth, marriage of, to 
Hamilton, 1 1 3. 

Schuyler, Mrs., and Charles Lee, 61-62. 

Scotch-Irish breed in the West, 225, 
228. 

Scott, John Morin, 103. 

Scott, General, 253, 298. 

Seabury, Samuel, 107. 

Sears, Isaac, 103, 108. 

Seventh of March speech, Webster's, 
404-406. 

Sevier, John, 238-239. 

Shays's rebellion, 118, 126, 199. 

Shepard, Edward M., 348. 

Shirley, Governor William, 20. 

Slavery, Jefferson an advocate of aboli- 
tion of, 158-159; prohibited north 
of Ohio River, 164; Tyler's views of, 
330-332. 

Smith, Goldwin, misconception of, con- 
cerning Madison, 187. 

Smith, Jeremiah, 375. 

Smith, Melanchthon, 125. 

Southard, William L., 356, 

South Carolina, ordinance of nullifica- 
tion in, 297-299, 326, 386-394. 

Specie Bank of 1740, 1 6- 1 7. 

Specie circular, the, 347, 348. 

Spencer, Herbert, should be read by 
every American, 310. 

Spoils system, inauguration of the, 288. 

Stamp Act, opposition to, in Boston, 
28-31. 

Stark, John, in battle of Ticonderoga, 61. 

State debts, federal assumption of, 127- 
130. 

State rights, question of, in Hamilton's 
time, 118-121. 

State Rights Whigs, Southern strict con- 
structionists call themselves, 339; 
Tyler, as leader of, elected Vice-pres- 
ident, 349-350; break with Northern 
Whigs over annexation of Texas, 
359; join the Democrats, 360. 

"Stepfather of his country," Washing- 
ton called the, 135. 

Steuben, Baron von, 88, 94, ill. 



INDEX 



421 



Strachey, Sir Henry, preservation of 

Charles Lee papers by, 72, 85. 
"Strictures on a Friendly Address to 

all Reasonable Americans," Charles 

Lee's, 69. 
Subtreasuries, establishment of, 349; bill 

for abolishing, passed, 352. 
"Summary View of Rights of British 

America, A," Jefferson's, 152. 
Surplus, distribution of, 346-347. 



Talladega, battle of, 243. 
Tallasahatchee, battle of, 243. 
Taney, R. B., 294, 304. 
"Tariff of abominations,'' 297, 334, 384. 
Tariff, protective, Harr.:lton an advocate 

of, 132 ; Jackson opposed to a, 297 ; 

Clay favours, 323 ; John Tyler and, 

332,357-358; Webster's attitude on 

a, 371. 384-386. 
Tarleton, Banastre, 81-82. 
Taylor, Zachary, 402-403. 
Tazewell, Littleton, 330. 
Tea ships in Boston harbour, 40-41. 
Tecumseh, 242-243, 341. 
Temple, Mr., duel of, with William 

Whately, 40. 
Tennessee admitted to Union, 235. 
Thames, battle of the, 243, 340-341. 
Thomas, Captain John, 397. 
"Three-fifths rule," compromise of the, 

203. 
Ticonderoga, battle of, 61. 
Tilden, Samuel J., 175. 
Tippecanoe, battle of, 242, 340. 
" Tippecanoe and Tyler too," 350. 
Toast, Jackson's immortal Union, 297, 

334- 

Tohopeka, battle of, 244. 

Tories, English, chief characteristics of, 
171-173; attempt to call Jackson's 
followers, 339. 

Townshend Acts, 31. 

Traffic, interstate, just after the Revolu- 
tion, 196-198. 

Trimble, Robert, 330. 

Trollope, Mrs., on America, 275. 

Trumbull, Jonathan, 12. 



Tyler, John (the elder), 197, 327-328. 

Tyler, John, birth of, 328 ; member of 
legislature, 329 ; elected to national 
House, 330 ; arguments on slavery 
question, 330-332 ; opposes protec- 
tive tariff, 332 ; governor of Virginia, 
333 ; elected to Senate, 333 ; break 
with President Jackson, 335 ; op- 
posed to United States Bank, 336- 
338 ; vice-presidential campaigns, 
340-342, 349-350 ; becomes Presi- 
dent on Harrison's death, 351 ; 
United States Bank question, 352- 
353 ; contest with Congress on Fis- 
cal Bank bill, 353-358 ; allied with 
Democrats on Texas question, 360. 

Tyler, Lyon Gardiner, 327. 

U 

United States Bank. 5^; Bank, National. 
Upshur, Abel P., 356. 



Van Buren, Martin, Jackson's Secretary 
of State, 285 ; resigns secretaryship, 
292 ; nominated minister to England 
but not confirmed, 295 ; mantle of 
Jefferson fell on, 311-312; elected 
President, 342 ; and the panic of 
1837, 348-350; defeated in presi- 
dential campaign of 1840 by Harri- 
son, 350. 

"Van Buren," E. M. Shepard's, 348. 

"Virginia dynasty" of Presidents, the, 
279. 

"Virginia plan," the, 199, 200, 201, 202, 
217-218. 

Virginia resolutions of 1798, 174, 210- 
211. 

W 

War of 1812, 216-217, 241-252. 
Ward, General Artemas, 70-71, 78. 
Warren, Mercy, description of Charles 

Lee by, 68. 
Washington Benevolent Society of 

Portsmouth, 370. 
Washington, city of, bargain over loca- 



422 



INDEX 



tion of, 129-130; burned by the 
British, 216-217, 245, 246. 

Washington, George, admiration of 
British for, 4; Charles Lee's first 
acquaintance with, 58; receives 
Charles Lee at Mount Vernon, 67; 
reasons for appointment as com- 
mander-in-chief, 70; at battle of 
Monmouth, 89-92; altercation with 
Hamilton, 112-II3; chooses Hamil- 
ton and Jefferson for members of his 
cabinet, 125, 167; termed "the step- 
father of his country," 135; ap- 
pointed by Adams commander of 
army for expected war with France, 
137; first president of Potomac 
Company, 196. 

Watkins, Tobias, 290. 

Wayne, Anthony, 89. 

Weathersford, 243-244. 

Webster, Daniel, birth of, 367; gradu- 
ated from Dartmouth, 368 ; mar- 
riage, 369; elected to Congress, 
370; the Dartmouth College case, 
373-379; Bunker Hill orations and 
eulogy on Adams and Jefferson, 380- 
381 ; represents the Boston district in 
Congress, 381-384; the "free trade 
speech," 382-383; elected to Sen- 
ate, 384; attitude on protection, 
384-386; the "Reply to Hayne," 
312, 387-391; "The Constitution 
not a Compact between Sovereign 
States," 393-394; speech in White 
murder trial, 397; home at Marsh- 
field, 397-398; second marriage, 
398; candidate for presidency, 341, 
398, 409 ; Secretary of State in Har- 
rison-Tyler administration, 351, 356, 
399-401; attitude on fugitive slave 
law, 404—409; Seventh of March 
speech, 404; Fillmore's Secretary of 
State, 409; death, 409; mode of 
dsess, 270, 389 n. 

Webster, Colonel Ebenezer, 365-367. 

Webster, Ezekiel, 369, 378, 398. 

Wedderburn, David, abuse of Franklin 

by, 44-45- 
•* Westchester Farmer, A," 107. 



Whately, William, 38, 40. 

Whately letters, the, 37-38; published 
in America, 40; effect of, on Hutch- 
inson's reputation, 43-44; Franklin 
publicly abused by Wedderburn on 
account of, 44-45. 

Wheelock, Rev. Eleazar, 373. 

Wheelock, John, 373-374. 

Whigs, beginning of party called, 295, 

339- 
Whiskey rebellion, the, 132-133. 
White, Hugh Lawson, 340, 341. 
White murder trial, Webster's speech 

in, 397- 
Whittier, J. G., 309. 
Wickliffe, Charles A., 356. 
Wildcat banking in early New England, 

13-22. 
Wilkes, John, 64, 65. 
Wilkins, Isaac, 107. 
William and Mary College, 151, 327, 

328, 333- 
Williamsburg, state capital of Virginia 

removed from, 162. 
Wilson, James, 114. 
Winsor, Justin, 390 n. 
Wirt, William, 303, 334. 
Witherspoon, President, of Princeton, 

106. 
Wood, Rev. Samuel, 368. 
Woodbury, Levi, 294. 
Wormeley, Ralph, on Charles Lee as 

author of " Letters of Junius," 96. 
Writs of Assistance, 26. 
Wythe, George, 151, 157, 161, 206. 



X 



X. Y. Z. despatches, the, 210. 



Yates, Robert, 119. 

Yeomanry of England, comparison of, 
and corresponding class in France, 
145-148. 

Yorke, Sir Joseph, opinion of, concern- 
ing Charles Lee, 88. 



Essays 

Historical and Literary 



BY 

JOHN FISKE 



" If thou wotildst press into the infinite, go out to ail 
parts of the finite.''^ 

— GOETHE. 



TWO VOLUMES IN ONE 

VOLUME II 
IN FAVOURITE FIELDS 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 

1907 

^U rights reserved 



Copyright, 1902, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 

Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1902. Reprinted 
November, 1902; February, 1903, 
New edition, two volumes in one, May, 1907. 



NortoooD ilress 

J. S. Gushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



PREFATORY NOTE 

I WISH to express my cordial acknowledgments to 
Harper & Brothers ; also to the editor of the Cosmo- 
politan, in whose magazines three of the Essays in 
this volume have appeared. 

ABBY MORGAN FISKE. 

Westgate, 

October 15, 190a. 



J 



CONTENTS 

FAGB 

I. Old and New Ways of Treating History . . i 

II. John Milton 35 

III. The Fall of New France ..... 69 

IV. Connecticut's Influence on the Federal Con- 

stitution 123 

V. The Deeper Significance of the Boston Tea 

Party 161 

VI. Reminiscences of Huxley 197 

VII. Herbert Spencer's Service to Religion , ,227 

VIII. John Tyndall 239 

IX. Evolution and the Present Age .... 249 

X. Koshchei the Deathless 285 

Index 307 



I 



OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING 

HISTORY 



OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 

It would not be easy to name any king who has left 
behind him a more odious memory than Henry VIII. 
of England. The incidents of his domestic life have 
won for him a solitary kind of immortality. The 
picture of him with which most of us have grown up 
from childhood is that of a Bluebeard who, as soon 
as he got tired of a wife, would have her beheaded 
and forthwith marry another. Probably the popular 
notion of his reign does not contain much more than 
this, unless it be a vague remembrance of his quarrel 
with Rome. But forty years ago Mr. Froude set 
before the world a very different conception of King 
Henry, in which he appears as a patriot ruler, endowed 
with many excellent qualities of mind and heart, and 
much to be pitied for the perversity of fortune which 
attended his selection of wives. In these conclusions 
Mr. Froude no doubt went rather too far, as is often 
the case when novel views are propounded. With 
regard to its general effects upon the English people, 
Henry's rule was, on the whole, eminently good; but 
the fierce reign of terror which counted Sir Thomas 
More among its victims is something to which one 
is not easily reconciled, and in the king's character 
there are features of the ruffian which no ingenuity 
can explain away. As for the Bluebeard notion, 

3 



4 OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 

however, it is to a great extent dissipated. The 
domestic tragedy remains as hideous and loathsome 
as ever, but in the case of the two queens who lost 
their heads, the king appears more sinned against 
than sinning. Catherine Howard unquestionably 
brought her fate upon herself, and in all probability 
the same is true of Anne Boleyn, who fares worse 
and worse as we learn more about her. The critical 
historian still finds much to condemn in Henry VHI., 
but between his verdict and that of the traditional 
popular opinion there is a very wide difference. 

Another instance of such a wide difference is fur- 
nished by the conduct of Edward I. with reference to 
the disputed succession to the throne of Scotland. 
A few months ago ^ there was published a new edition 
of a rather dull romance which our grandfathers 
used to find entertaining, " The Scottish Chiefs," by 
Jane Porter. I doubt if it will get many readers now. 
In this book the greatest of English kings, a man 
who, for nobility of character, was like our Washing- 
ton, is recklessly charged with tyranny and bad faith, 
while Bruce and Wallace are treated not merely as 
heroes — which is all right — but as faultless heroes; 
even such an act as the murder of the Red Comyn 
in the church at Dumfries is mentioned with approval. 
Curiously enough the views set forth in this romance 
have been traditional not only in Scotland but in 
England, so that when Mr. Robert Seeley, in i860, 
published his book entitled " The Greatest of all the 
Plantagenets," his defence of King Edward took many 
people by surprise. The question was soon afterward 
handled by Freeman in such a way as to set it at rest. 

1 1896. 



OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 5 

Concerning Edward's entire good faith there is no 
more room for doubt. 

Yet another and different kind of example of the 
havoc wrought upon popular opinions by critical 
investigation is furnished by the legend of William 
Tell. To our grandfathers that famous archer was 
as real a personage as Oliver Cromwell, though 
doubts on the subject had been expressed in Switzer- 
land as long ago as 1598, the story was declared to 
be apocryphal by a learned Swiss clergyman, named 
Freuden-Berger, in 1760, and it was completely ex- 
ploded by the Swiss historian Kopp in 1835. The 
persons called William Tell and Gessler never existed 
in Switzerland, contemporary chroniclers never men- 
tion them, the story first appeared in print one hundred 
and seventy-five years after the date, 1307, when its 
events were said to have occurred, and, moreover, it 
was copied from the book of a Danish historian, Saxo 
Grammaticus, written more than a century before 
1307. In Saxo's book it is a Danish archer, named 
Palnatoki, who shoots an apple from his son's head, 
and the incident is placed in the year 950. The 
Swiss story is identical with the Danish story, and 
the latter is simply one version of a legend that is 
found in at least six different Teutonic localities, as 
well as in Finland, Russia, and Persia, and among 
the wild Samoyeds of Siberia. There can be little 
doubt that the story is older than the Christian era, 
and in the course of its wanderings it has been 
attached now to one locality and now to another, 
very much as the jokes and witticisms told a century 
ago of Robert Hall were in recent years ascribed to 
Henry Ward Beecher. 



ifei 



6 OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 

So many cherished traditions have been rudely upset 
as to produce a widespread feeUng of helplessness with 
regard to historical beliefs. When one is so often 
proved to be mistaken, can one ever feel sure of being 
right? Or must we fall back upon the remark, half 
humorous, half cynical, once made by Sainte-Beuve, 
that history is, in large part, a set of fables, which men 
agree to believe in ? The great critic should have put 
his remark into the past tense. Men no longer agree 
to believe in fables. All historical statements are 
beginning to be sifted. But this winnowing of the 
false from the true, the perpetual testing of facts and 
opinions, is not weakening history but strengthening 
it. After a vast amount of such criticism, destructive 
as much of it is, our views of the past are not less but 
more trustworthy than before. 

The instances above cited may illustrate for us the 
first of the differences between the old and the new 
ways of treating history. The old-fashioned historian 
was usually satisfied with copying his predecessors, , 
and thus an error once started became perpetuated; 
but in our time no history written in such a way would i 
command the respect of scholars. The modern histo- 
rian must go to the original sources of information, to 
the statutes, the diplomatic correspondence, the reports 
and general orders of commanding officers, the records 
of debates in councils and parliaments, ships' log-books, 
political pamphlets, printed sermons, contemporary 
memoirs, private diaries and letters, newspapers, broad- 
sides, and placards, even perhaps to worm-eaten ac-;|| 
count books and files of receipts. The historian has 
not found the true path until he has learned to ransack 
such records of the past with the same untiring zeal 



OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 7 

that animates a detective officer in seeking the hidden 
evidences of crime. If some other historian a century 
ago told the same story that we are trying to tell, he 
probably told it from fewer sources of information than 
we can now command ; but if this is not the case, if a 
century has passed without increasing our direct infor- 
mation upon the story in hand, it has at least been a 
century of added human experience in general, so that 
even when we work upon the same materials as our 
predecessor we are likely to arrive at somewhat differ- 
ent conclusions. Our first rule, then, is never to rest 
contented with the statements of earlier historians, 
unless where the evidence behind such statements is no 
longer accessible. This is especially likely to occur 
with ancient history, for the various agencies for re- 
cording events were much less complete and accurate 
before than since the Christian era. We have a hun- 
dred ways of testing Macaulay's account of the expul- 
sion of the Stuarts, where we have one way or no way 
of checking Livy's narrative of the Samnite Wars ; in 
the one case our knowledge is like the light of midday, 
in the other it is but a twilight. 

There are periods, however, in ancient history, con- 
cerning which our authorities are luminous, and the 
picture is doubtless, on the whole, as correct as those 
which can be framed for modern periods. The literary 
monuments of Greek life in the age of the Pelopon- 
nesian War — the narratives of Thucydides and Xeno- 
phon, the works of the great tragedians, the wit and 
drollery of Aristophanes, the dialogues of Plato, the 
speeches of Andokides and Lysias — with the remains 
of sculpture and architecture, bring that ancient society 
wonderfully near to us. Other periods in Athens and 



8 OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 

Jerusalem, Alexandria and Rome, stand out before us 
with truthful vividness. But on the whole the regis- 
tration of material for history has been much more full 
and consecutive since the Christian era than before it, 
and to this general statement the darkest of what we 
call the Dark Ages, as, for example, the period of 
Merovingian decline in the seventh and eighth centu- 
ries, forms but a partial exception. The registry of 
laws and edicts was supplemented by the innumerable 
chronicles which we owe to the marvellous industry of 
the monks. He who looks over a few of the seven 
hundred majestic volumes of the Abbe Migne's collec- 
tion, will come into the fit frame of mind for admiring 
that gigantic and patient labour which most of us fail 
to revere only because its results have never appealed 
to our sense of sight. For literary excellence, monkish 
Latin has little to charm us as compared with the diction 
of Cicero, but in its vast treasure-houses are enshrined 
the documents upon which rest in great part the foun- 
dations of our knowledge of the beginnings of modern 
society. Ages which have left behind so much written 
registry of themselves are not to be set down as wholly 
dark. 

What would English history be without the mo- 
nastic chronicles of Malmesbury, of St. Albans, of 
Evesham, of Abingdon, and many another? If you 
would understand the mental condition of our fore- 
fathers in King Alfred's time, with regard to diseases, 
medicaments, and household science in general, there 
is nothing like the mass of old documents published 
by the Record Office under the quaint title of " Leech- 
doms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of England."^ Or 

1 Ewald, " Paper and Parchment," p. 279. 



OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 9 

if it be the social condition of England under the later 
Plantagenets that interests us, nothing could serve our 
purpose better than the political poems and songs of 
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from that same 
repository of national archives. The Year Books, 
too, containing the law reports from the eleventh cen- 
tury onward are an almost inexhaustible mine of 
material for studying the social growth of the people 
whose centres of national government are to-day at 
London and at Washington. 

It is the increased facility of access to the national 
archives that has contributed more than anything else 
to the deeper and more accurate knowledge of Eng- 
lish history which the past generation has witnessed. 
A few years ago it might have seemed that the seven- 
teenth century had been exhaustively treated. With 
Ranke's masterly volumes and those of Guizot, with 
Carlyle's edition of the letters and speeches of Cromwell, 
and with Macaulay s fascinating narrative, one might 
have supposed that for some time to come there would 
be no further need for new books on that period. Yet, 
forthwith, came Mr. Rawson Gardiner, and began to 
rewrite the whole century. His first volume started 
with the year 1603, and his fourteenth arrives only at 
the year 1649; ^ong life to the author! For the time 
which it covers, his book supersedes all others. The 
work was made necessary by the wholesale acquisition 
of fresh sources of information, settling vexed ques- 
tions, filling gaps in the chain of cause and effect, and 
throwing a bright light upon acts and motives hereto- 
fore obscure. This acquisition of new material is one 
among many instances of the results that have flowed 
from improved ways of keeping public archives ; so 



iO OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 

that a few words upon that subject may be not with- 
out interest. 

Let us be thankful to our forefathers in the old 
country that they did not wilfully burn their public 
documents, but only hid them here and there, in gar- 
rets and cellars, sheds and stables, where, but for a 
merciful Providence, fire and vermin would long ago 
have made an end of them. In 1550 it was discovered 
that some important Chancery records had been eaten 
away by the lime in the wall against which they re- 
posed, and a few years afterward Queen Elizabeth 
undertook to have suitable storage provided for all 
such things in the Tower of London. What passed 
for suitable storage we may learn from a letter written 
a hundred years later to King Charles II. by William 
Prynne, Keeper of the Records : " I endeavoured the 
rescue of the greatest part of them from that desola- 
tion, corruption, confusion, in which (through the 
negligence, nescience, or slothfulness of their former 
keepers) they had for many years by past lain buried 
together in one confused chaos under corroding, 
putrefying cobwebs, dust, filth, in the dark corner of 
Caesar's Chapel in the White Tower, as mere useless 
reliques. . . . The old clerks [were] unwilling to i 
touch them for fear of fouling their fingers, spoiling 
their clothes, endangering their eyesight and healths 
by their cantankerous dust and evil scent. In raking 
up this dung-heap ... I found many rare, ancient, 
precious pearls and golden records. But all [these] 
will require Briareus his hundred hands, Argus his 
hundred eyes, and Nestor's centuries of years, to 
marshal them into distinct files, and make exact 
alphabetical tables of the several things, names, places 



OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY ii 

comprised within them." ^ Yet for nearly two cen- 
turies after this appeal the priceless records went on 
accumulating in such places as the White Tower, the 
basement of which was long used for storing gun- 
powder, or in the Temple and Lincoln's Inn, where 
many documents perished in flames as late as 1849. 
It was not until 1859 that a suitable building was 
completed in which the national archives of Great 
Britain at last found a worthy home. 

At the same time there came a sudden end to the 
jealousy with which these materials for history were 
withheld from public inspection. Occasionally, in 
former days, some eminent scholar would be allowed 
access to such as were accessible. Thus, in 1679, 
Gilbert Burnet was permitted to use such papers as 
might be of help in completing his " History of the 
Reformation." For such permission a warrant from 
the lord chamberlain or one of the secretaries of state 
was required, and there was red tape enough to deter 
all but the most persistent seekers. About 1850 the 
wise master of rolls. Lord Romilly, put an end to all 
this privacy, and now you can go to the Record Office 
and read the despatches of Oliver Cromwell or the 
letters of Mary Stuart as easily as you would go to a 
public library and look over the new books. 

But this is not all. As fast as is practicable the state 
papers, chronicles, charters, court rolls, and other archives 
of Great Britain are published in handsome volumes 
carefully edited, so that the whole world may read them. 
Year by year enlarges the ability of the American 
scholar to inspect the sources of British history by 
visiting some large library on this side of the Atlantic. 

1 " Paper and Parchment," p. 256. 



12 OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 

I need not dwell upon these facts. One can easily 
see that the appearance of fresh material must now 
and then oblige us to reverse, and often to modify, our 
judgments upon men and events. The student of his- 
tory who has once learned how to go to the source 
will never be satisfied with working at second hand. 
And the multiplication of sources goes on. What I 
have mentioned of the British archives has gone on in 
other countries, although it is not everywhere that 
access has been made so easy. Many secrets of Euro- 
pean history are still locked up in the Vatican, to 
reward the persistent curiosity of a future generation. 
Meanwhile the Italian government publishes, in a 
series of magnificent folios, all the original material 
that it can find in Italian libraries concerning the dis- 
covery of America ; and the publication, year by year, 
of the records of the India House at Seville keeps 
throwing fresh light upon that intricate subject. In 
such musty records there is no quarter from which 
valuable information may not be derived. A few 
years ago I showed, by a comparison of extracts from 
old Spanish account books, that the younger Pinzon, 
the commander of Columbus's smallest caravel in 
1492, was not absent from Spain during the year 
1506; and this little point went a long way toward 
settling two or three important historical questions.^ 

It is not only public documents that thus come for- 
ward to help us, but every year witnesses the publica- 
tion of private memoirs and correspondence. What a 
flood of light is thrown upon the Wars of the Roses by 
the Paston Letters, written by members of a Norfolk 
family from 1422 to 1509. Public attention was first 
1 "Discovery of America," II., p. 68. 



OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 13 

drawn to these papers about a century ago, but the 
last edition, published in 1872, contained more than four 
hundred letters never before printed. In recent years 
we have added to our resources for studying American 
history many new letters of Patrick Henry, George 
Mason, Gouverneur Morris, John Dickinson, Manas- 
seh Cutler, the older and younger Tyler, and many 
others. Most important of all, in some respects, are 
the Diary and Letters of Thomas Hutchinson, last 
royal governor of Massachusetts, published in London 
about ten years ago by one of his great-grandsons ; it 
is impossible to study this book without having one's 
conception of the beginnings of the American Revo- 
lution in some points slightly, in others profoundly, 
modified. 

In curious ways things keep turning up for the first 
time or else attracting fresh attention. A certain 
beautiful map, made in Lisbon between September 7 
and November 19, 1502, has been lying now for nearly 
four centuries in the Ducal Library at Modena, where 
it was left by the husband of Lucretia Borgia. About 
fifteen years ago it was noticed that this map con- 
tains a delineation of the peninsula of Florida, with 
twenty-two Spanish names on the coast, several of 
them misunderstood and deformed by the Portuguese 
draughtsman. As this is positive proof that Florida 
was visited by Spaniards before September 7, 1502, 
the long-neglected map has suddenly become a histori- 
cal document of the first importance. 

Again, during our Revolutionary War a certain 
British adventurer, named Charles Lee, was at one 
time the senior general under Washington in the Con- 
tinental army. Having been taken prisoner by the 



14 OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 

British and locked up in the City Hall at New York, 
he tried to mend his fortunes by giving treasonable aid 
to the enemy, and in an elaborate paper he unfolded 
what seemed to him the best plan for overthrowing 
the Americans. General Howe's secretary, Sir Henry 
Strachey, carried this paper home to England, with 
other papers, and stowed them all away in the library 
of his country house in Somerset. There, after a 
slumber of more than eighty years, Lee's treasonable 
paper was found, and it became necessary to rewrite 
nearly two years of our military history. Still more 
curious was the career of the manuscript " History of 
Plymouth," by William Bradford, one of the first gov- 
ernors of the colony. This precious manuscript was 
used and quoted by several New England writers, and 
came into the possession of the Rev. Thomas Prince, 
pastor of the Old South Church, who died in 1758. 
This learned antiquarian kept his books in a little 
room in the steeple, which he used as a study, and 
bequeathed them to the church.^ After the British 
troops evacuated Boston in 1779, it was presently 
found that the Bradford MS. had vanished. Perhaps 
some officer had read it with interest and confiscated 
it to his own uses. At all events, it turned up in 1853 
in the Bishop of London's palace at Fulham, and it 
has since been published, as the very corner-stone of 
New England history. A fragment of the same Gov- 
ernor Bradford's letter-book was found in a grocer shop 
in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and was published in 1794. 
This reminds one of the first folio of the Spanish his- 
torian Oviedo, printed in 1526. Of this valuable book 
only two copies are known to be in existence, and one 

1 Hiirs "History of the Old South Church," II., p. 54. 



OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 15 

of these was rescued from a butcher in Madrid just as 
he was tearing a sheet from it to wrap a sirloin of 
beef which a servant-girl had purchased. It has always 
been a matter of regret that we have had no minutes 
of the proceedings of the Congress which was assem- 
bled in New York in 1765 for considering the Stamp 
Act, but I am told that such minutes have lately been 
discovered in a chest of old papers, soaked and mouldy, 
under a leaky roof in a Maryland attic. But this is 
nothing to the Rip van Winkle slumber of Aristotle's 
essay on the Constitution of Athens, from which Euro- 
pean scholars used to quote as late as the sixth century 
after Christ, but of which nothing has been seen since 
the ninth century until the other day a copy was found 
in an Egyptian tomb. On one side of the sheets of 
papyrus is an account of receipts and expenditures 
kept by the steward or bailiff of a gentleman's private 
estate in the years 78 and 79 after Christ; on the 
other side is the long-lost essay of Aristotle, a most 
valuable contribution to Greek history, which now, 
since its publication in 1891, may be read like any 
other Greek book. From other Egyptian tombs have 
been recovered a part of one of the lost tragedies of 
Euripides, interesting passages from Athenian orators, 
and the account of the Crucifixion from the Greek 
gospel attributed by the early Fathers to St. Peter, — - 
an intensely interesting narrative, which was published 
in London in 1894. 

In recalling such illustrations, one is in danger of 
straying from one's main thesis, and so I will only add 
;hat, with the progress of the arts, there are found 
/arious new ways of making original materials ac- 
:essible. Here photography has done wonders. Old 



I 



I6 OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 

parchments can be reproduced with strictest accuracy 
with all their stains and rents and cracks and 
smooches, and with our magnifying-glass we may 
patiently scrutinize each small detail and satisfy our- 
selves as to whether it has been rightly interpreted. 
A beautiful example of this is furnished by the book 
of an American scholar, whose premature death 
science mourns. " The Finding of Wineland by 
Arthur Middleton Reeves, contains complete photo- 
graphic facsimiles of the three famous Icelandic manu- 
scripts which tell of the Norse discovery of America. ; 
Another example is the gigantic work of another ■ 
American, Benjamin Stevens, who is publishing in i 
London a hundred volumes of diplomatic correspond- . 
ence relating to the American Revolution, the whole" 
of it reproduced by photography. The time has thus | 
arrived when the scholar, without stirring from his I 
chimney-corner, may send by mail to distant countries | 
and obtain strict copies of things that it would once, 
have cost months of travelling to see. It_ is not hoped, 
that the time will come when an occasional literary; 
pilgrimage, with its keen pleasures, can be quite dis. 
Jensed with; nor is it likely to come. But we see 
how much has been done toward bringing the hisH 
torian face to face with his sources of information 

The increasing disposition to insist upon knowledge 
at arst hand, which distinguishes the new from the 
old ways of treating history, is but one phase o the 
scientific and realistic spirit of the age in which w 
live It is one of the marks of the growing intel 
lectual maturity that comes with civilization. _ 1 hen 
is nothing to show that the highly trained minds o 
the present day are wider in grasp or deeper m pent 



OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 17 

tration than those of many past ages, but in some re- 
spects they are more mature than those of any past 
age, and one chief symptom of this maturity is the 
strict deference paid to facts. This marks the his- 
toric spirit as it marks the scientific spirit. In children 
the respect for facts is very imperfectly developed. 
The presence of wild exaggeration or deliberate fic- 
tion in children's stories does not necessarily imply 
dishonesty or love of lying. The child's world is not 
coldly realistic, it is full of make-believe; it has sub- 
jective needs that demand expression even if objective 
truthfulness gets somewhat slighted. The Italians 
have a pithy proverb, Si non e vero e ben, trovato, 
which defies literal translation into English, but which 
means, If it isn't true, at all events, it hits the mark. 
In the childish type of a story, it is above all things 
desired to hit the mark, to produce the effect. Edifi- 
cation is the prime requisite ; accuracy is subordinate. 
There never was an adult mind more scrupulously 
loyal to fact than that of Charles Darwin, but in a 
chapter of autobiography he says : " I may here con- 
fess that as a little boy I was much given to inventing 
deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done for the 
sake of causing excitement. For instance, I once 
gathered much valuable fruit from my father's trees 
and hid it in the shrubbery, and then ran in breathless 
haste to spread the news that I had discovered a hoard 
of stolen fruit." ^ This kind of romancing is not 
peculiar to children, but continues to characterize the 
untrained adult mind, as in the yarns of old soldiers 
and sailors, and it is liable to persist wherever one's 
professional pursuits call for intense devotion to some 

^ Darwin's "Life and Letters," L, p. 28. 



1 8 OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 

immediate practical object. Strong partisanship in 
politics or in theology is thus unfavourable to accu- 
racy of statement, and the advocates of sundry social 
reforms are noted for a tendency to "draw the long 
bow." Since edification is the first desideratum, the 
facts must be squeezed and twisted, if need be, so as 
to furnish it. " They can bear it, poor things," we 
can fancy our preacher saying; "they are used to it." 

A certain obtuseness, or lack of sensitive perception, 
with regard to truthful accuracy has thus been widely 
prevalent among mankind. At times this has shown 
itself in the production of pseudonymous literature, 
or books bearing the names of other persons than 
their real authors. The two centuries preceding and 
the two centuries following the Christian era were 
especially an age in which pseudonymous literature 
was fashionable, and to this class belong some writings 
of great importance in the early Church. There was 
no dishonesty in this, no intention to deceive the 
public. It was simply one of the crude methods first 
adopted without premeditation when earnest preachers 
of novel doctrines sought to influence communities on 
a wide scale by the written rather than the spoken 
word. Any book that contained ideas known or 
believed to be those of some eminent teacher was 
liable to be ascribed to him as its author. And the 
claim, uncritically made, was uncritically accepted. 

In this connection may be mentioned the common 
practice of ancient historians in inventing speeches. 
When Thucydides, for example, describes the inter- 
esting debate at Sparta that ushered in the Pelo- 
ponnesian War, he makes all the characters talk in 
the first person, — the Corinthian envoys, the envoy 



OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 19 

from Athens, the venerable King Archidamas, the 
implacable Jingo Sthenelaidas ; but the words that 
came from their lips are the words of the historian. 
He knows in general the kind of sentiments that 
each one represented, and he makes up their speeches 
accordingly. No doubt the readers of Thucydides 
understood how this was done, and nobody was misled 
by it; but a critical age would not tolerate such a 
fashion. The critical scholar wants either the real 
thing or nothing ; when inverted commas are used 
in connection with the first person singular, he wants 
to see the very words that came from the speaker, 
even with their faults of grammar or of taste. Half 
a century ago the letters of George Washington were 
edited by the late President Sparks of Harvard, who 
felt himself called upon to amend them. Where the 
writer said " Old Put," the editor would change it to 
*' General Putnam," and where Washington exclaims 
that " things are in a devil of a state," he is made to 
observe that "our affairs have reached a deplorable 
condition." This sort of editing belongs to the old 
ways of treating history. The spirit of the new ways 
was long ago expressed by honest Oliver Cromwell, 
when he said to the artist, " Paint me as I am — mole 
and all ! " 

It has become difificult for us, in these days of 
punctilious antiquarian realism, to understand the 
tolerance of anachronisms that formerly prevailed in 
literature and on the stage, when in the tragedies of 
Corneille and Racine the wrathful Achilles and Aga- 
memnon, king of men, not only reviled each other 
in the court phrases of Versailles, but strutted about 
in bag-wigs and lace ruffles, while Klytemnestra lifted 



20 OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 

her ample hoop-skirts in a graceful courtesy. In such 
matters our keener historic sense has become exacting. 
A few years ago, when I visited one of the Alaska 
missions, my attention was called to a large picture 
of the Adoration of the Magi, painted by a young 
Indian. It was a remarkable piece of work, and had 
some points of real merit, but it was noticeable that 
all the faces — those of the Virgin and Child, of 
St. Joseph and the Wise Men — were Indian faces. 
This red man's method was the primitive method. 
The age of Louis XIV. had not quite outgrown it. 
But the change since then has been like the change 
from coaches to railways. History is made to serve 
the arts, and in turn has pressed the arts into her 
service. Sculptor and architect, painter and poet, 
must alike delve in the past for principles and for 
illustrations. We have even known the conscientious 
poet to set public opinion right on a matter of history. 
One of the commonplaces of history, one of the things 
that everybody knows, is that Cotton Mather was one 
of the chief instigators and promoters of the witchcraft 
horrors in Salem ; yet, like many of the things that 
everybody knows, it is not true. The notion started 
in a slanderous publication by one of Mather's 
enemies, and was repeated parrot-like by one his- 
torian after another, including the late George Ban- 
croft, until it occurred to the poet Longfellow to take 
some of the incidents of the Salem witchcraft as the 
theme of a tragedy. In order to catch the very spirit 
of 1692, the poet studied with his customary critical 
thoroughness the original papers relating to the affair, 
until he perceived that Cotton Mather's part in it was 
not an instigating but a restraining part, and that if 



OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 21 

his written injunctions had been heeded not one of 
the nineteen victims could have been sent to the 
gallows. When the poem was published, exhibiting 
the great clergyman in this new light, some sage 
critics shook their heads and muttered, " Poetic 
license ! " But it has been abundantly proved that 
Longfellow was quite right. 

I have said enough about going to original sources. 
It is time to point out a different sort of contrast be- 
tween old and new ways of treating history. Let us con- 
sider how history began. In primitive times, of which 
modern savage life is a wayside survival, after a tribe 
had returned from a successful campaign, there was a 
grand celebration. Amid feast and hilarity, booty 
was divided and captives were slaughtered. Then 
the warriors painted their faces and danced about the 
fire, while medicine-men chanted the prowess of the 
victorious chieftain and boasted the number of ene- 
mies slain. There were also sacrifices to the tutelar 
ghost-deities, and homage was paid to their ancestral 
virtues. In such practices epic poetry and history had 
their common origin, and it must be said that to this 
day history retains some of the traces of its savage 
infancy. With most people it is still little more than 
a glorified form of ancestor-worship. One sees this 
not only in the difficulty of arousing general interest 
in events that have happened at a distance, but also in 
the absurdly narrow views which different countries 
or different sections of the same country take with 
regard to matters of common interest. In reading 
French historians one perpetually feels the presence 
of the tacit assumption that divides the human race 
into Frenchmen and Barbarians ; but in this regard 



22 OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 

Frenchmen, though perhaps the most hopeless, are by 
no means the only sinners. Through the literature 
of all nations runs that same ludicrous assumption that 
our people are better than other people, and from this 
it is but a short step to the kindred assumption that the 
same national acts which are wrongful in other people 
are meritorious in ourselves. The feelings which 
underlie these assumptions are simply evanescent 
forms of the feelings which in a savage state of society 
make warfare perpetual, and they are in no wise com- 
mendable. Their most stupid and contemptible phase 
is that which prompts the different sections of a com- 
mon country to twit and flout one another with the 
various misdeeds of their respective ancestors. Such 
pettiness of outlook is incompatible with an intelligent 
conception of the career of mankind. That some 
people have been more favourably situated than others, 
that some have accomplished more in sundry direc- 
tions than others, is not to be denied. The study of 
such facts and their causes is one of fascinating inter- 
est, and forms part of the most important work of 
the historian; but so long as he allows his views to 
be coloured by fondness for one people as such, and 
dislike for another people as such, his conclusions are 
sure to be warped and to some extent weakened. The 
late Mr. Freeman was a historian of vast knowledge, 
wide sympathies, and unusual breadth of view, but 
he was afflicted by two inveterate prejudices, — one 
against Frenchmen, the other against the House of 
Austria, — and the damage thereby caused is flagrant 
in some parts of his field of work and traceable in 
many more. 

History must not harbour prejudices, because the 



OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 23 

spirit proper for history is the spirit proper for science. 
The two are identical. The word " history " is a 
Greek word, originally meaning " inquiry." Aristotle 
named one of his great works " a history concerning 
animals," whence from Pliny and in modern usage we 
often hear of "natural history." It is the business of 
the historian to inquire into the past experience of the 
human race, in order to arrive at general views that 
are correct, in which case they will furnish lessons 
useful for the future. It is a task of exceeding deli- 
cacy, and the dispassionate spirit of science is needed 
for its successful performance. Science does not love 
or hate its subjects of investigation ; the historian 
must exercise like self-control. I do not mean that he 
should withhold his moral judgment; he will respect 
intelligence and bow down to virtue, he will expose 
stupidity and denounce wickedness, wherever he en- 
counters them, but he will not lose sight of the ulti- 
mate aim to detect the conditions under which certain 
kinds of human actions thrive or fail; and that is a 
scientific aim. 

Yet another difference between old and new methods 
invites our attention. The old-fashioned history, still 
retaining the marks of its barbaric origin, dealt with 
little save kings and battles and court intrigues. It 
consisted mainly of details concerning persons. Since 
the middle of the eighteenth century more attention 
has been paid to the history of commerce and finance, 
to geographical circumstances, to the social conditions 
of peoples, to the changes in beliefs, to the progress of 
literature and art. A modern book which is remark- 
able for the skill with which it follows all the threads 
in the story of national progress simultaneously, and in 



24 OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 

one vast and superb picture shows each element co- 
operating with the others, is the well-known " History 
of the English People" by John Richard Green. Both 
Green and Freeman were friends of mine, and I am 
tempted to relate an incident which illustrates their 
different points of view. Freeman's conception of 
history was more restricted, though within his nar- 
rower sphere he took a vast sweep. Most people 
remember his definition, " History is past politics and 
politics are present history." One day he took Green 
to task in a friendly way : " I say, Johnny, if you'll just 
leave out all that stuff about art and literature and 
how people dressed and furnished their houses, your 
book will be all right; as it is, you are spoiling its 
unity." Fortunately this advice went unheeded. The 
poetic quality of Green's genius controlled that im- 
mense wealth of material without injuring the unity 
of the narrative, and gave us a book that represents 
the highest grade of historical work in our time and is 
likely to live as a classic. 

In the first half of the nineteenth century some 
confused attempts were made to treat history like a 
physical science, and trace the destinies of nations to 
peculiarities in climate and soil, ignoring moral causes. 
There was also an inclination to underrate the work of 
great men, and ascribe all results to vaguely conceived 
general tendencies. Against these views there came a 
spasmodic reaction which asserted that history is noth- 
ing but the biographies of great men. The former 
view was most conspicuously represented by Buckle, 
the latter by Carlyle and Froude. Concerning the 
point at issue between them, it may be said that since 
general tendencies are manifested only in the thoughts 



OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 25 

and actions of men, it is these that the historian must 
study, and that as causal agencies a Cromwell or a 
Luther may count for more than a million ordinary 
men ; but after all, our ultimate source of enlighten- 
ment still lies in the study of the general conditions 
under which the activity of our Cromwell or Luther 
was brought forth. Most minds find pleasure in per- 
sonal incidents, while a few have the knowledge and 
the capacity for sustained thinking that are needed 
for penetrating to the general causes. There is a type 
of mind that is interested chiefly in what is unusual or 
catastrophic; but it is a more scientific type that is 
interested in tracing the silent operation of common 
and familiar facts. By this latter method physical 
science has prospered in recent days as never before, 
and the same has been the case with the study of 
history. 

Allusion has been made to the useful lessons that 
may be found in the study of the past. In searching 
for such lessons great care must be taken to avoid the 
fallacy of reasoning from loose analogies. This com- 
mon fallacy is injured by the pernicious habit of 
arguing from words without stopping to consider the 
things to which the words are applied. For example, 
many Americans seem to suppose that our govern- 
ment is like that of France because both are called 
republics, and unlike that of England because the lat- 
ter is represented by a hereditary sovereign. In point 
of fact, the government of France is substantially the 
same, whether it is called an empire or a republic ; in 
neither case do the French people have self-govern- 
ment; the resemblances to the United States are super- 
ficial and the differences are fundamental. Whereas, 



26 . OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 

on the other hand, the people of England govern them- 
selves as effectively as the people of the United States, 
and the differences are superficial and the resemblances 
are fundamental. Yet, as a rule, people cannot free 
themselves from the trammels of names, and any com- 
munity of ignorant half-breed Indians ruled by an 
irresponsible despot is thought worthy of our special 
sympathy if that despot happens to be labelled presi- 
dent rather than king. 

A flagrant instance of reasoning from loose analogies 
was furnished about a century ago by an English 
member of Parliament, William Mitford, who wrote a 
history of Greece under the influence of his over- 
mastering dread of parliamentary reform. His first 
volume appeared in 1784, when the reformers seemed 
on the eve of the victory which they did not really 
win till 1832. Mitford wished to show that democracy 
is always and everywhere an unmitigated evil, and he 
used the history of Athens to point his moral, although 
Athenian democracy was not really like anything in 
the modern world. A more curious distortion of facts 
than Mitford's " History of Greece " has seldom been 
put into print. 

When Grote, half a century later, wrote his magnifi- 
cent " History of Greece," he appeared as the champion 
of Athens. He, too, was a member of Parliament, an 
advanced free-thinker and democrat. It was as natu- 
ral for him to love the Athenians as for Mitford to 
hate them, and possibly his sympathies may once or 
twice have urged him a little too far. But his mental 
powers and his scholarship were immeasurably greater 
than Mitford's, and he did not try to force a lesson 
from his facts; he tried to understand the people 



OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 27 

whom he described. The result was a picture of the 
old Greek world so faithful and so brilliant that it can- 
not soon be superseded. A German history of Greece 
was afterward written by Ernst Curtius, — a charming 
book, rich in learning and thought. But the experi- 
ence of the Englishman as the native of a free country 
gave him an advantage in understanding the Athe- 
nians, the lack of which we feel seriously when we 
read the German work. A similar deficiency, due to 
similar shortcomings in political training, we find in 
one of the greatest works of the nineteenth century, 
Mommsen's " History of Rome." 

But while Grote achieved such success in depicting 
the free world of Hellas, he was less successful when 
he came to the Macedonian Conquest, and with the 
close of the generation contemporary with Alexander 
the Great he seemed to lose his interest in the subject. 
His history stops at that point with words of farewell 
that echo the mournful spirit of baffled Demosthenes. 
The spectacle of free Greece was so beautiful and in- 
spiring that one cannot bear to see it come to an end. 
Yet the diffusion of Greek culture through the Roman 
world, from the Euphrates to the shores of Britain, is 
a theme of no less interest and importance. In many 
ways the learned and thoughtful books of Mr. Mahaffy 
illustrate this point. It may suffice here to observe 
that, without a careful study of the three centuries 
following Alexander, one cannot hope to understand 
the circumstances of the greatest event in all his- 
tory, the spreading of Christianity over the Roman 
Empire. 

We are thus led to notice another important dif- 
ference between the old and the new ways. The old- 



28 OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 

fashioned student of history was apt to confine his 
attention to the so-called classical period, such as the 
age of Perikles, or of Augustus, or of Elizabeth, or of 
Louis XIV. Such a habit is fatal to the acquirement 
of anything like a true perspective in history. What 
should we say of the botanist who should confine him- 
self to Jacqueminot roses and neglect what gardeners 
call weeds? How far would the ornithologist ever get 
who should study only nightingales and birds of para- 
dise ? In truth the dull ages which no Homer has 
sung nor Tacitus described have sometimes been criti- 
cal ages for human progress. Such was the eighth 
century of the Christian era, which witnessed the rise 
of the Carlovingians ; and such again was the eleventh, 
the time of Hildebrand and William the Norman. 
This restriction of the view to literary ages has had 
much to do with the popular misconception of the 
thousand years that elapsed between the reign of 
Theodoric the Great and the discovery of America. 
For many reasons that period may rightly be called the 
Middle Ages ; but the popular mind is apt to lump 
those ten centuries together, as if they were all alike, ,, 
and to apply to them the misleading epithet, Dark J 
Ages. A portion of the darkness is in the minds of 
those who use the epithet. The Germanic reorganiza- 
tion of Europe, and the fearful struggle with Islam, 
did indeed involve a break with the ancient civiliza- 
tion, but there was no such absolute gulf as that which i 
exists in the popular imagination. The darkest age' ' 
was perhaps that of the wicked Prankish queens, 
Brunhild and Fredegonda ; but the career of civiliza-' • 
tion was then far more secure than it had been a i 
thousand years earlier, in the age of Perikles, when all 



OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 29 

Europe, except a few Greek cities, was immersed in 
dense barbarism. 

A similar exclusive devotion to literary or classical 
periods leads us to misjudge certain communities as 
well as certain ages. Our perspective thus gets warped 
in space as well as in time. Few persons realize the 
great importance of the Roman Empire of the East, 
all the way from Justinian to the iniquitous capture of 
Constantinople by the French and Venetians in 1204. 
In these ages Constantinople was the chief centre of 
culture ; through her commercial relations with Genoa, 
she exercised a civilizing influence over the whole of 
western Europe, and she was the military bulwark of 
Christendom first against Saracen, then against Turk, 
until at last she succumbed in an evil hour which we 
have not yet ceased to mourn. Largely for want of a 
period of classical literature the so-called Byzantine 
Empire has been grievously underrated.^ 

But the worst distortion of perspective in our study 
of the career of mankind is one of which we have 
only lately begun to rid ourselves. It is the distortion 
• caused by supercilious neglect of the lower races. In 
: the course of the fifteenth century the expansion of 
maritime enterprise brought civilized Europeans for 
the first time into contact with races of queer-looking 
men with black or red skins, often hideous in feature 
and uncouth in their customs. They called such 
people savages, and the name has been loosely applied 
to a vast number of groups of men in widely different 
stages of culture, but all alike falling far short of the 
European level. Such people have no literature, and 

^ In the original manuscript Dr. Fiske makes a marginal annotation — 
" Also ill feeling of western Europe tov/ard Greek Church." 



30 OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 

their customs are often unpleasant ; and so they have 
been unduly despised. Fortunately travellers have 
given copious descriptions of savage and barbarous 
tribes, but they have been lazily accepted as freaks 
or oddities, and it is only lately that they have been 
subjected to serious study, comparison, and analysis. 
It is not too much to say that this has wrought a 
greater change in our conception of human history 
than all other causes put together. For it has formed 
the occasion for a vast extension of the comparative 
method. Early in the present century something like 
a new Renaissance was begun when Englishmen in 
India began to study Sanskrit, and were struck with 
its resemblance to the languages of Europe. The 
first result of such studies was the beginning of 
comparative philology in the establishment of the 
Aryan family of languages ; pretty soon there fol- 
lowed the comparative study of myths and folk-tales ; 
and then came comparative jurisprudence, which, for 
the world of English readers, is chiefly associated 
with the beautiful writings of Sir Henry Maine. 
Next it began to appear that many problems which 
remain insoluble so long as we confine our attention 
to the Aryan world soon yield up their secret if we ^ 
extend our comparison so as to include the speech, 
the beliefs, and the customs of savages. In taking 
this great step the name of an American investigator, 
the late Lewis Morgan, with his profound classifica- 
tion of stages of human culture, stands foremost ; and 
the work of our Bureau of Ethnology at Washington, 
under the masterly direction of Major Powell, is tji 
doing more toward a correct interpretation of the 
beginnings of human society than was ever done ,. 



t 



OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 31 

before. It is proved beyond a doubt that the insti- 
tutions of civiHzed society are descended from institu- 
tions like those now to be observed in savage society. 
Savages and barbarians are simply races that have 
remained in phases of culture which more civilized 
races have outgrown ; and hence one helps to explain 
the other. Certain obscure local institutions, for 
example, in ancient Greece and Rome, have been 
made quite intelligible by the study of similar insti- 
tutions among American Indians. In these ways 
history, without ceasing to be a study of individuals 
and nations, has come to be in the broadest sense 
the study of the growth and decay of institutions. 

Thus for a good many reasons we see that the new 
ways of treating history are better than the old. We 
are better equipped for getting at the truth, and it is a 
larger kind of truth when we have got it. Yet the 
historian is forgetting his highest duty if he allows 
himself to become unjust to the men of past times. 
There were giants in former days, and if we can see 
farther than they, it is because we stand upon their 
shoulders. Nor will all our boasted science make 
great historians, in the absence of the native genius. 
Let us never fail in reverence to the masters of our 
craft. The world will never know a more delightful 
narrator than Herodotus, careful and critical as we 
now know him to be, wide in outlook and keenly in- 
quisitive, with his touches of quaint philosophy and 
his delicious Ionic diction. Or consider Thucydides, 
with his mournful story of the war in which the Pelo- 
ponnesian states combine against Athens, one of the 
greatest crimes known to history, — somewhat such a 
crime as war between the United States and Great 



32 OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 

Britain would be to-day. In the rugged sentences of 
Thucydides we are brought face to face with the most 
powerful intellect except Shakespeare's that ever dealt 
with historic themes. Thence it is indeed a falling off 
to the mild, urbane, if you please superficial, Xenophon ; 
but who can weary of that exquisite Attic prose, or 
read without choking the cry of the Ten Thousand 
on catching sight of the friendly sea ? Then a word 
must be said of grave and wise Polybius, most trust- 
worthy of guides, and brilliant Tacitus, pithy and pun- 
gent, but now and then too fond of pointing a moral 
and needing at such times to be taken with a grain 
of salt. The pictures of the ancient world in Plu- 
tarch, though not always accurate in detail, have an 
ethical value that is beyond price. We must not 
forget Gregory of Tours, the honest, credulous bishop 
whose uncouth Latin gives such a vivid portrayal of 
Merovingian times ; nor charming Froissart, with his 
mediaeval French, bringing before us a world of belted 
knights and jewelled dames, where common people 
have no claim to notice. A century later the states- 
manlike Commines and much slandered Machiavelli 
show us the victory of Reynard over Isegrim, of or- 
ganizing intelligence over the cruder forces of feudalism, 
while the saintly Las Casas tells of the discovery of 
America and the deeds of the Spanish conquerors. 
In Vico we see a great intellect failing in the pre- 
mature attempt to make history scientific, and then 
we pass on to Voltaire, the witchery of whose match- 
less style in his " Essai sur les Mceurs " reveals a 
grasp of universal history in perspective such as no 
man before him had attained. Finally, with a grasp 
scarcely inferior to Voltaire's, the gigantic learning of 



OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 33 

Gibbon, aided by marvellous artistic sense in the 
grouping of huge masses of detail, gives us what is in 
many ways the greatest book of history that ever was 
written. It now needs to be supplemented at many 
points, but it is not easy to look forward to a time 
when it can be superseded. It is curious to note the 
contrast between this book and one that used always 
to be associated with it in men's minds. " The History 
of England," by David Hume, has lived more than a 
century, partly because of its fine narrative style, partly 
because of the absence, until recently, of any better 
book of convenient size ; but it was never in any sense 
a great history, and it is now worse than worthless to 
the general reader. The reason for this is its lack of 
knowledge of the subject with which it deals. It is 
the superficial and careless work of a man of brilliant 
genius. In contrast with this the untiring patience 
of Gibbon, his exhaustless wealth of knowledge, his 
almost miraculous accuracy, his disinterested calmness 
of spirit, his profundity of critical discernment, com- 
bined with the artistic temperament to produce a work 
as enduring as the Eternal City itself. And with this 
example my concluding advice to the student of new 
methods is. Forget not to profit by the old masters. 



II 

JOHN MILTON 



II 

JOHN MILTON 

To bring a sketch of John Milton within the com- 
pass of a single hour seems much like attempting the 
feat described by Jules Verne, of making the journey 
around the world in eighty days. In the dimensions 
of that human personality there is a cosmic vastness 
which one can no more comprehend in a few general 
statements than one could sum up in some brief for- 
mula the surface of our planet, with all its varied con- 
figuration, all its rich and marvellous life. There have 
been other men, indeed, more multifarious in their 
worth than Milton, men whose achievements have 
been more diversified. Doubtless the genius of 
Michael Angelo was more universal, Shakespeare 
touched a greater number of springs in the human 
heart ; and such a spectacle as that of Goethe, making 
profound and startling discoveries in botany and com- 
parative anatomy while busy with the composition of 
" Faust," we do not find in the life of Milton. A mere 
catalogue dealing with the Puritan poet and his works 
would be shorter than many another catalogue. But 
when we seek words in which to convey a critical esti- 
mate of the man and what he did, we find that we have 
a world upon our hands. Professor Masson, of the 
University of Edinburgh, has written the " Life of Mil- 
ton " in six large octavos ; he has given as much space 
to the subject as Gibbon gave to the " Decline and 

37 



38 JOHN MILTON 

Fall of the Roman Empire," yet we do not feel that he 
has treated it at undue length. 

The Milton family belonged to the yeomanry of 
Oxfordshire. They were just such plain, brave, intel- 
ligent people as the great body of those who migrated 
to New England. About five miles from Oxford 
there lived, in the reign of Elizabeth, one Richard 
Milton, who was a ranger or keeper of the Forest of 
Shotover. In 1563 there was born to him a son John, 
just a few months before the birth of William Shake- 
speare in the neighbouring town of Stratford-on-Avon. 
Richard Milton was a stanch Roman Catholic. In 
due course of time his son John became a student at 
Oxford, and was converted to Protestantism. One 
day the father picked up an English Bible in the son's 
room. High words ensued ; the young man, sturdy 
and defiant, was cast off and disinherited, and so pres- 
ently made his way to London and set up in business 
as a scrivener. In that business were combined the 
occupations of the notary public with some of those of 
the solicitor. This John Milton not only took affida- 
vits, but drew up contracts and deeds, and probably 
helped his clients to invest their money. The selling 
of law books and stationery was also part of the scrive- 
ner's business, in which professional man and trades- 
man were thus quaintly mixed. The scrivener Milton 
was distinguished for intelligence and integrity; he 
became wealthy, or at any rate extremely comfortable 
in circumstances, and he won general respect and con- 
fidence. At the age of thirty-seven he married a lady 
named Sarah Bradshaw. In the simple, cosey fashion 
of those days, the family lived over the office or shop, 
which was in Bread Street, Cheapside, with no street 



JOHN MILTON 39 

numberto mark it, but the sign of an eagle with out- 
stretched wings, the family crest of the Miltons. 

It was here, at the Spread Eagle, that the scrivener's 
eldest son, John Milton, the poet, was born on the 9th 
of December, 1608. The house, which was afterward 
burned in the Great Fire of 1666, stood in the very 
heart of London, which was then a city with scarcely 
200,000 inhabitants and had not quite lost the rural 
look and quality. The house stood not only within 
the sound of Bow bells, but in the very shadow of the 
belfry where they were hung, and hard by was the 
Mermaid Tavern, whither one can fancy that Shake- 
speare, resorting on his last visit to London in 16 14, 
may well have passed by the scrivener's door and 
smiled upon the beautiful boy of six with his delicate 
rosy cheeks and wealth of auburn curls. Throughout 
life, Milton's personal beauty attracted attention ; the 
great soul was enshrined in a worthy tabernacle. 
Several portraits of him, painted at different ages, are 
still preserved. We can imagine the honest pride 
with which the father took him, when ten years old, 
to sit to Cornelius Jansen. The charming picture, 
which has often been engraved, lights up for us the 
story of the poet's childhood. It shows us a grave 
but sweet and happy face, of which the prevailing 
character, as Professor Masson has well said, is "a 
lovable seriousness." Under it the first engraver in- 
scribed these lines from " Paradise Regained " : — 

" When I was yet a child, no childish play 
To me was pleasing ; all my mind was set 
Serious to learn and know, and thence to do, 
What might be public good : myself I thought 
Born to that end, born to promote all truth 
And righteous things." 



40 JOHN MILTON 

There is no doubt that this consecration of himself 
to a lofty ideal of life was begun in early childhood. 
In this earnestness of mood, this clear recognition of 
the seriousness of life and its duties, Milton was a born 
Puritan. But along with this general temperament, the 
lines here quoted tell us of something more. The 
youthful Milton was conscious, dimly at first but more 
distinctly with advancing years, of a mission which he 
was sent into the world to fulfil. An acquaintance 
of his, John Aubrey, tells us that he had begun to 
write verses before his tenth year. It seems clear that 
he was still very young when the vocation of the poet 
came before his mind as the calling which he should 
like to adopt, to which he would fain consecrate his 
life. But the true poet is far more than a builder of 
rhymes ; he is the man who sees the deepest truths 
that concern humanity, and knows how to proclaim 
them with power and authority such as no other kind 
of man save the poet can wield. So the boy Milton 
felt himself " born to promote all truth and righteous 
things," and to this end he became eager to learn and 
know, in order to act for the public good. By his 
twelfth year the raging thirst for knowledge had so far 
possessed him that he commonly sat at his books until 
after midnight. 

It was in a refined and pleasant home that this boy 
grew up. His father was at once indulgent and wise, 
his mother gentle ; there was an older sister and a 
younger brother ; good company came to the house. 
The scrivener Milton was a musical composer of merit 
enough to be mentioned in contemporary books along- 
side of such masters as Tallis and Orlando Gibbons. 
The house in Bread Street had an organ, upon which 



JOHN MILTON 4I 

the young Milton learned to play with skill and po\ver. 
He also played on the bass viol, and to the end of his 
days his interest in music never flagged. We may 
suppose that from the father's genius the son inherited 
that delicate appreciation of vocal sounds which makes 
his poetry the most melodious ever written in English, 
— sometimes rivalled, but never excelled, by Shake- 
speare in his sonnets and in the snatches of song that 
sparkle in his plays. 

In those days, precocious boys were almost always 
intended by their parents for the Church, and such was 
the case with Milton. From his twelfth to his six- 
teenth year he went to the school in St. Paul's church- 
yard, which the famous reformer Colet had founded 
a century before. At the same time, he read at home 
with a tutor, a canny Scotch Presbyterian, named 
Thomas Young. At the age of sixteen, besides his 
Greek and Latin, Milton had learned French and 
Italian thoroughly, and had made a good beginning in 
Hebrew. Soon after his sixteenth birthday, he entered 
college, but not at Oxford, where his father had studied. 
No reason is assigned for sending him to Cambridge, 
but the reason seems self-evident. The inveterate 
Toryism of Oxford — if I may call it by the word 
which came into use a few years later — must have 
been distasteful to his Puritan family. The eastern 
counties were becoming more and more a hotbed for 
free thinking in religion and politics, probably because 
of their frequent intercourse with the Netherlands. 
The atmosphere of Cambridge was charged with 
Puritanism and denial of the divine right of kingship ; 
one might have seen there many harbingers of the 
coming storm. Early in 1625 Milton entered Christ's 



42 JOHN MILTON 

College, Cambridge, and there he lived for seven years 
and a half. His study and bedroom, unaltered since 
his time, are still shown to visitors ; and in the beauti- 
ful garden — most beautiful, perhaps, of the gardens 
in that exquisite country town — you may see the mul- 
berry tree, many centuries old, with its decrepit boughs 
still resting on the wooden props which Milton's loving 
care placed under them. 

Of his life at Cambridge we have not many details. 
More than once his proud, independent spirit got him 
into difficulties. There is a story that he was once 
flogged by one of the tutors, but it is not well sup- 
ported ; he seems, however, to have been at one time 
punished with what in an American college would be 
called "suspension." The cause was not neglect of 
study or serious misbehaviour, but defiant indepen- 
dence. He had none of youth's wild or vicious in- 
clinations ; then, as always, his conduct was without 
spot or flaw. It was part of his lofty conception of 
the poet's calling that the poet's soul should admit no 
kind of defilement in thought or deed. No priest or 
prophet ever more devoutly revered the work for 
which God had chosen him than this Puritan poet. 
The feeling of religious consecration and self-devotion 
finds strong expression in the sonnet written on his 
reaching the age of twenty-three : — 

" How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, 

Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year ! 
My hasting days fly on with full career, 

But my late spring no bud or blossom sheweth. 

Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth, 
That I to manhood am arrived so near, 
And inward ripeness doth much less appear 

That some more timely-happy spirits endureth. 



JOHN MILTON 43 

Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow, 
It shall be still in strictest measure even 

To that same lot, however mean or high, 
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven ; — 
All is, if I have grace to use it so, 

As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye." 

One is reminded by this of Goethe's simile of the star 
which, without hasting but without resting, fulfils the 
destiny assigned it. The spirit is that of the old monk- 
ish injunction, to study as if for life eternal but to live 
prepared to die to-morrow, the very spirit of consecra- 
tion to a lofty purpose.^ That Milton at the age of 
twenty-three should have felt any lack of inward ripe- 
ness seems odd when we know that his scholarship 
was already generally recognized as greater than had 
ever been seen at Cambridge, save perhaps when Eras- 
mus was teaching Greek there. When Milton took 
his master's degree the next year he was urged to stay 
and accept a fellowship. But at that time it was neces- 
sary for the fellow of a college to be in holy orders, 
and although Milton's parents had meant that he 
should be a clergyman, he had by this time discovered 
that he required more liberty of thought and speech 
than could be found in the Church. In his own forcible 
words, " I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence 
before the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun 
with servitude and forswearing." So he left Cam- 
bridge and went home. For a moment he thought of 
taking law as a profession, but it was clear that such 
a course would tend to defeat his cherished purpose of 
writing a great poem, and the idea was abandoned. 

^ " Disce ut semper vidurus vive, ut eras moriturus^'' of which he has 
given so admirable a translation, became the motto of Dr. Fiske's life, and 
was graven above the hearth in his library at " Westgate," in Cambridge. 



44 JOHN MILTON 

Milton's father had retired from business and was 
Hving in plain rural comfort in the pretty village of 
Horton, within sight of the towers of Windsor Castle, 
and about two hours ride on horseback from London. 
It was near enough to allow going into the city to 
hear music or to spend an evening at the theatre. 
In Horton, the young poet lived at his father's house 
for nearly six delightful years of study and meditation. 
He pushed on his studies in Hebrew, including Rab- 
binical literature as well as the Bible ; and to all this 
he added a knowledge of Syriac. With Greek litera- 
ture his acquaintance was minute and thorough, and 
he seems to have written Greek fluently. But his 
mastery of Latin was such as has rarely been equalled. 
He not only wrote it, whether prose or verse, with the 
same facility as English, but his command of the lan- 
guage was such as few of the Roman authors them- 
selves had attained. His Latin style has not, indeed, 
the elegant perfection of Cicero and Virgil ; it toler- 
ates, or rather rejoices, in phrases which those writers 
would have deemed barbarous; but this does not 
come from carelessness or lack of knowledge, it is 
done on purpose. Milton was so much at home in 
Latin that he would play with it just as James Russell 
Lowell delighted in playing with English. It was 
none of your dead-and-alive schoolmaster's Latin, but 
a fresh and flowing diction, full of pith and pungency. 

During the quiet years at Horton, the chief studies 
of Milton were in the history and literature of Italy. 
Of English and French literature down to his own 
time, he had compassed pretty much all that was 
accessible and worth knowing, — a much easier 
achievement in those days than it would be now, 



JOHN MILTON 45 

after these two added centuries of printing. To 
Greek history, from early times to the fall of Constan- 
tinople, he also gave much attention. 

It was at Horton that Milton's first great poems 
were written. More or less meritorious verse in 
Greek, Latin, and English he had written at Cam- 
bridge ; and in the Christmas hymn, written in his 
twenty-first year, — 

" It was the winter wild, 
While the heaven-bom child 
All meanly wrapped in the rude manger lies," 

there are some stanzas of magnificent promise. But 
his first important work was " Comus," a mask per- 
formed at Ludlow Castle in 1634. The mask was a 
kind of dramatic entertainment, in which scenery and 
gorgeous costumes formed a setting for dialogue alter- 
nating with music. It was fashionable in England 
from the time of Edward III. to the time of Charles I. 
Some of the finest specimens of the mask were written 
by Ben Jonson, who was still living in 1634. With 
further development the mask would probably have 
become opera, but its career was suddenly cut short 
by Puritanism. " Comus " seems to have been the 
last one that was performed. The eminent composer, 
Henry Lawes, had undertaken to furnish music for a 
mask ; he asked his friend Milton to write the words, 
and the result was " Comus," a piece of poetry more 
exquisite than had ever before been written in Eng- 
land save by Shakespeare. There is an ethereal 
delicacy about it that reminds one of the quality of 
mind shown in such plays as the " Tempest " and the 
" Midsummer Night's Dream." The late Mark Patti- 



46 JOHN MILTON 

son has observed that " it was a strange caprice of 
fortune that made the future poet of the Puritan epic 
the last composer of a Cavalier mask." But in truth, 
while Milton was a typical Puritan for earnestness 
and strength of purpose, he was far from sharing the 
bigoted and narrow whims of Puritanism. He had 
no sympathy whatever with the spirit that condemned 
the theatre and tore the organs out of churches and 
defaced noble works of art and frowned upon the love 
of beauty as a device of Satan. He was independent 
even of Puritan fashions, as is shown by his always 
wearing his long, auburn locks when a cropped head 
was one of the distinguishing marks of a Puritan. 
With the same proud independence he approved the 
drama and kept up his passion for music. In his 
seriousness there was no sourness. A lover of truth 
and righteousness, he also worshipped the beautiful. 
In his mind there was no antagonism between art and 
religion, — art was part of religion ; the artist, like the 
saint, was inspired by God's grace. Listen to what 
he says of the power of poetic creation, " This is not 
to be obtained but by devout prayer to that Eternal 
Spirit that can enrich with all utterance and know- 
ledge, and sends out His seraphim with the hallowed 
fire of His- altar, to touch and purify the life of whom 
He pleases." There is the Puritan doctrine of grace 
applied in a manner which few Puritans would have 
thought of. 

The blithe and sunny temper of Milton is illus- 
trated in the two exquisite little poems with Italian 
titles he wrote while at Horton, — " L'Allegro " or 
" The Cheerful Man," and " II Penseroso " or " The i 
Thoughtful Man." In them the delicious life he was 



JOHN MILTON 47 

living in the soft English country finds expression. 
Nothing more beautiful has come from human pen. 
In the first one, the poet addresses the fair goddess of 
Mirth, " so buxom, blithe, and debonair." In her com- 
pany he fain would dwell, 

" In unreproved pleasures free ; 
To hear the lark begin his flight, 
And singing startle the dull night, 
From his watch-tower in the skies, 
Till the dappled dawn doth rise. 

While the cock with lively din 
Scatters the rear of darkness thin, 
And to the stack, or the barn door, 
Stoutly struts his dames before." 

In the bright morning thus ushered in, our poet would 
go forth on his walk, 

** By hedge row elms on hillocks green, 

* * * * 

While the ploughman near at hand 
Whistles o'er the furrowed land, 
And the milkmaid singeth blithe. 
And the mower whets his scythe. 
And every shepherd tells his tale 
Under the hawthorn in the dale." 

As he goes on his way a series of exquisite, home- 
like landscape pictures, such as can be seen nowhere 
else in such perfection as in England, greets his eye. 

" Russet lawns and fallows gray. 
Where the nibbling flocks do stray. 
Mountains on whose barren breast 
The labouring clouds do often rest ; 
Meadows trim with daisies pied. 
Shallow brooks and rivers wide. 



48 JOHN MILTON 

Towers and battlements it sees, 
Bosomed high in tufted trees. 

# * * * 

Hard by a cottage chimney smokes 
From betwixt two aged oaks, 
Where Corydon and Thyrsis met 
Are at their savoury dinner set 
Of herbs and other country messes 
Which the neat-handed Phillis dresses." 

After the day and evening, with their innocent country 
pleasures, have received due mention, the occasional 
visit to London is not forgotten. 

" Then to the well-trod stage anon, 
If Jonson's learned sock be on, 
Or sweetest Shakespeare, fancy's child. 
Warble his native woodnotes wild ; 
And ever against eating cares 
Lap me in soft Lydian airs. 
Married to immortal verse. . . ." 

And so on to the final invocation. 

" These delights, if thou canst give, 
Mirth, with thee I mean to live." 



Nothing could be further from the conventional Puri- - 
tanism, as remembered in New England, than the mood 
in which these verses were conceived. In the com- if 
panion address to Melancholy, wherein Milton's 
deeper soul finds expression, we have all the earnest- 
ness of the Puritan, without the slightest attempt to 
suppress or hide the worship of the beautiful. From 
the opening line : — 

" Hence, vain deluding joys," 



JOHN MILTON 49 

we seem to hear a hurried sweep of stringed instru- 
ments, till all at once enters the solemn note of the 
organ : — 

" Come pensive Nun, devout and pure, 
Sober, steadfast, and demure, 
All in a robe of darkest grain, 
Flowing with majestic train." 

The passage is too long for quotation ; we must pass 
to the evening picture, 

" Where glowing embers through the room 
Teach light to counterfeit a gloom, 
Far from all resort of mirth. 
Save the cricket on the hearth. 
Or the bellman's drowsy charm, 
To bless the doors from nightly harm." 



Then in silent meditation the scholar recalls the teach- 
ings of Plato, and seeks to imagine what may betide 
man's immortal soul when all that is earthly shall have 
passed away. He peers into the secrets of science, but 
is not forgetful of the varied drama of human life. 

" Some time let gorgeous Tragedy 
In sceptred pall come sweeping by." 

With epic and legend and all the storied lore of the 
Middle Ages and the Orient, the night passes and the 
morning comes with soft showers. 

" And when the sun begins to fling 
His flaring beams, me Goddess bring 
To arched walks of twilight groves, 



50 JOHN MILTON 

Where the rude axe with heavied stroke 
Was never heard the nymphs to daunt, 
Or fright them from their hallowed haunt. 
There in close covert by some brook, 
Where no profaner eye may look. 
Hide me from Day's garish eye, 
While the bee with honeyed thigh. 
That at her flowery work doth sing. 
And the waters murmuring 
With such consort as they keep. 
Entice the dewy-feathered sleep." 

Best known of all the passages in this pair of poems is 
that in which the poet repairs from the brookside to the 
studious cloister, with reminiscences of Cambridge and 
that glorious chapel with its " high embowed roof " and 
" storied windows," its " pealing organs " and " full- 
voiced choir," whence the thought is carried on to 
the hermitage with its mossy cell, where the story 
ends as it started with the delights of science; — 

" Where I may sit and rightly spell 
Of every star that heaven doth shew. 
And every herb that sips the dew ; 
Till old experience do attain 
To something like poetic strain. 
These pleasures, Melancholy, give, 
And I with thee will choose to live." 

These twin poems belong to the class of pastorals 
such as were written by Theocritus and Virgil. A 
third poem, of similar construction, written at Horton 
in 1637, has ever since been recognized as the most 
perfect specimen in existence of that kind of poetry. 
The framework of " Lycidas " is purely conventional ; 
no one but a scholar steeped to the marrow of his bones 



JOHN MILTON 5 1 

in ancient literature could have worked under such 
conditions without losing something of the freedom 
and freshness of his thought. The pastoral form was 
admirably adapted to Milton's purpose ; in that com- 
pletely artificial and impossible world of shepherds and 
shepherdesses, nymphs and fauns, it was easy to keep 
the utterance of strong emotion subservient to the 
supreme artistic end of beauty for its own sake. 
Things could be said, too, which, if explicitly said of 
certain persons living in England in 1637, would not 
be endured. The occasion of the poem was the death 
of Edward King, a young clergyman who had been 
Milton's friend and fellow-student at Cambridge. Mr. 
King was drowned in a shipwreck on the Irish Sea, in 
crossing from Chester to Dublin ; and his sorrowing 
friends in Cambridge made up an album of thirty-six 
original poems in Greek, Latin, and English, to be 
printed as a memorial volume. Most of the poems 
were of the crude, trashy sort usually found in such 
collections. One of them exclaims : — 

" To drown this little world ! Could God forget 
His covenant which in the clouds he set? 
Where was the bow ? — but back, my Muse, from hence, 
'Tis not for thee to question Providence," etc. 

Another says : — 

*' Religion was but the position 

Of his own judgment : Truth to him alone 
Stood naked ; he strung the Art's chain and knit the ends. 
And made divine and human learning friends," etc. 

A third says : — 

" Weep forth your tears, then ; pour out all your tide ; 
All waters are pernicious since King died." 



52 JOHN MILTON 

Another, with somewhat more poetic touch, refers to 
sunset : — 

" So did thy light, fair soul, itself withdraw 
To no dark tomb by nature's common law, 
But set in waves." 

After the rabble of versifiers let us now hear the poet. 
We may observe that the impersonation of Mr. King 
as the shepherd, Lycidas, while suggested by Greek 
conventional forms, is in fortunate harmony with the 
familiar Biblical comparison of the clergyman to the 
shepherd watching over his flock. How noble is 
the music of the well-known opening lines : — 

" Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more 
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, 
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude. 
And with forced fingers rude 
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year." 

The sad occasion is the death of young Lycidas, the 
poet's fellow-swain : — 

" For we were nurst upon the selfsame hill, 
Fed the same flock by fountain, shade, and rill. 
Together, both, ere the high lawns appeared, 
Under the opening eyelids of the morn. 
We drove afield," 

and so proceeds the charming description until the 
first change of theme : — 

" But O the heavy change, now thou art gone, 
Now thou art gone and never must return ! 
Thee, shepherd, thee the woods and desert caves, 
With wild thyme and the gadding vine o'ergrown, 
And all the echoes mourn. 



1 

I 



JOHN MILTON 53 

The willows and the hazel copses green 

Shall now no more be seen 

Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays. 

As kiUing as the canker to the rose, 

Or taint-worm to the weanling herds that graze, 

Or frost to flowers that their gay wardrobe wear, 

When first the white thorn blows, 

Such, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherd's ear." 

There follow the invocation to the nymphs, the sub- 
lime passage on Fame, " that last infirmity of noble 
minds," and then the shadow procession of figures that 
come as mourners, — the herald of Neptune, the tute- 
lar deity of the river Cam, and lastly " the pilot of the 
Galilean lake," St. Peter with his massy keys, who, 

"... shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake : — 
How well could I have spared for thee, young swain, 
Enough of such as for their bellies' sake 
Creep and intrude and climb into the fold ! " 

In the terrible invective thus introduced we read the 
doom of Archbishop Laud and his policy, until, in the 
concluding lines, which have greatly puzzled commen- 
tators, we seem to see the herdsman with his black*' f*-'^ 
mask and hear the dreadful thud of the two-handed 
broadaxe. In the unreal atmosphere of the pastoral 
eclogue, such denunciation might be indulged, even in 
an age when men were sent to jail for their printed 
words. 

From this furnace blast of indignation the change 
is magical to the wondrously beautiful call for the 
flowers : — 

" Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies, 
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine, 



54 JOHN MILTON 

The white pink and the pansy freaked with jet. 

The glowing violet, 

The musk rose and the well-attired woodbine, 

With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head. 

And every flower that sad embroidery wears : 

Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed. 

And daffodillies fill their cups with tears, 

To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies." 

Soon after this invocation, which has in it nothing to 
which an ancient Greek Hke Theocritus might not 
have responded with full sympathy, the mood once 
more changes, and the triumphant hope of the Chris- 
tian finds voice in the following sublime passage. We 
shall encounter in the course of it a word of which the 
meaning has utterly changed in the last two centuries ; 
Milton says " unexpressive " where we should say 
" inexpressible " or " beyond expression." 

" Weep no more, woful shepherds, weep no more, 
For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead, 
Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. 
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed. 
And yet anon repairs his drooping head. 
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore, 
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky ; 
So Lycidas, sunk low but mounted high. 
Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves. 
Where, other groves and other streams along, 
With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves, 
And hears the unexpressive nuptial song 
In the blest Kingdoms meek of joy and love. 
There entertain him all the saints above. 
In solemn troops and sweet societies. 
That sing and singing in their glory move. 
And wipe the tears forever from his eyes." 

From this magnificent organ peal of triumph, the very 
next line suddenly changes to a thought that is purely 



JOHN MILTON 55 

and emphatically pagan ; yet so consummate is the 
skill with which the varying modes of the poem have 
been marshalled that there is nothing abrupt or shock- 
ing in the change, but our minds follow in entire 
acquiescence : — 

" Now, Lycidas, the shepherds weep no more ; 
Henceforth thou art the genius of the shore 
In thy large recompense, and shalt be good 
To all that wander in that perilous flood." 

The next line shows that this change from the Chris- 
tian to the pagan mood was needed in order to intro- 
duce properly the exquisite scene that concludes the 
poem : — 

" Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills, 
While the still morn went out with sandals gray, 
He touched the tender stops of various quills, 
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay : 
And now the sun had stretched out all the hills. 
And now was dropt into the western bay. 
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue. 
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new." 

It was more than twenty years before the promise 
of the last line was fulfilled. Not until 1658 did Mil- 
ton turn to fresh woods and pastures new, when he 
began to work steadily at " Paradise Lost." In that 
long interval he wrote no poetry save a few sonnets 
and an occasional psalm. In the complete edition of 
Milton's works, the best edition, published by Picker- 
ing, in 185 1, the poems are all contained in two vol- 
umes, while the prose works fill six volumes. Let us 
see how so many works came to be written in prose. 

In 1638, still pursuing his studies toward the writ- 
ing of a great poem, Milton started for a journey on 



56 JOHN MILTON 

the Continent. He was now in his thirtieth year, and 
apparently had never earned a penny. By the few 
people of discernment he was already recognized as 
one of the foremost scholars in Europe and a poet of 
the rarest sort. His broad-minded father approved 
his plans, and cheerfully incurred the expense of this 
journey, which might last several years, at an average 
yearly cost of what in modern money might be called 
$1000. Milton's fifteen months upon the Continent 
were chiefly spent in Italy, where he was everywhere 
received with distinguished respect and courtesy. The 
incident which made the deepest impression upon him 
was a visit to the aged and blind Galileo at his villa 
near Florence. In " Paradise Lost " there are two 
allusions to the great astronomer, one in Book V. 
262 : — 

" As when by night the glass 
Of Galileo . . . observes 
Imagined lands and regions in the moon ; " 

the other in Book I. 287 : — 

" Like the moon, whose orb 
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views 
At evening from the top of Fesole, 
Or in Valdomo, to descry new lands, 
Rivers and mountains in her spotty globe." 

While in Italy, Milton wrote several charming sonnets 
in Italian, all addressed to a lady, perhaps one and the 
same lady, the object of some passing fancy. At 
Naples he was entertained by the Marquis Manso, who 
had formerly given shelter to the poet Tasso, and 
talked much to Milton about him. There he received 
news from England which led him to abandon his in- 



i 



JOHN MILTON 57 

tention of visiting Greece, and turn homeward. The 
day of reckoning, which he had foretold in " Lycidas," 
was at hand. Civil war was coming, and he felt that 
his country needed him. The date of his return home 
is fixed by that of his halt at Geneva. An Italian 
nobleman, driven from home for heresy, was living in 
the Swiss city, and the ladies of his family kept an 
album of autographs, in which, on June 10, 1639, Mil- 
ton wrote his name with the sentiment from " Comus " : 

" If Virtue feeble were, 
Heaven itself would stoop to her." 

In recent times this album came into the possession 
of Charles Sumner, and it may now be seen at Har- 
vard College Library. It contains also the autograph 
of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. 

The mention of this name brings us to the work 
which began to absorb Milton's time and strength 
soon after his return to England. We have not time 
enough for many details of it, nor is it worth our while 
to follow the poet in his various changes of domicile. 
The days in the earthly paradise of Horton were over, 
and he was to dwell henceforth in London, and fight 
for his ideal of liberty and good government. Soon 
after the opening of the Long Parliament, his inter- 
est in Church reforms led him to begin writing those 
remarkable political pamphlets in which he did such 
valiant service to the Puritan party. In the first 
series of such pamphlets, published in 1641, he at- 
tacked what he called " Prelacy," or the undue author- 
ity of priests and bishops. Opposed to the tyrannical 
policy of Archbishop Laud were two parties, one of 
moderate reformers, the other of Root-and-Branch 



58 JOHN MILTON 

men, as they were called, men who would have trans- 
formed the Episcopal Church into a Presbyterian. 
Many of these soon passed on farther, and became 
Congregationalists or Independents. It was not doc- 
trinal questions that divided parties, it was not an 
affair of theology, but of ecclesiastical politics ; repub- 
licanism was opposed to monarchy, alike in Church 
and in State ; Milton was from the first moment a 
Root-and- Branch man, his views were set forth with 
keen logic, invincible learning, and impassioned elo- 
quence ; his pamphlets were read far and wide ; he 
became a marked man, and the object of savage 
attacks. 

Curiously enough, the next series of Milton's pam- 
phlets related to the subject of divorce, and were sug- 
gested by domestic difficulties of his own. A few 
miles from Oxford there lived one Richard Powell, a 
gentleman of good family and one of the county mag- 
istrates, a High Churchman withal and a stanch 
Cavalier. He had a large family of children and kept 
open house, and thither the Puritan poet turned his 
steps in May, 1643. Whether he went to talk about a 
debt of ^500, which Mr. Powell had owed his father 
for sixteen years, or what other reason might have 
drawn him to that nest of royalists, does not appear. 
But when he returned to London in June, strange to 
tell, it was with one of the daughters, Mary Powell, as 
his bride. She was only seventeen, and as light- 
headed as Dora Copperfield. There was a brief frolic 
of cousins and bridesmaids, and then, when all had 
gone and the young girl was left alone in the society 
of this mighty thinker and scholar, more than twice 
her age, the sombre colour of such life soon came to 



JOHN MILTON 59 

be more than she could endure, and in August she 
begged leave to go back to mamma and stay till the 
end of September. The leave was kindly granted, but 
when the time came she did not return. Milton sent 
letter after letter, but there was no answer. After 
some weeks he sent a messenger, who was dismissed 
with rude words. 

Practically this might be interpreted as desertion, 
and in many places to-day would be judged fit ground 
for divorce. It was not so in England in Milton's 
time, and it led him to publish pamphlets advocating 
more freedom of divorce than then existed. He made 
no mention of his own trouble, but to us who read the 
knowledge of it lights up what he says. Probably he 
would have made efforts to obtain a divorce, but the 
lapse of two years wrought a change. In June, 1645, 
the battle of Naseby overthrew the king's party, and 
among other consequences the home of the Powells 
was seized and the family turned out of doors. Milton, 
too, became all at once a man of power, whose favour 
was worth seeking. Some friends conspired together 
and hid poor little Mary in a house in London, whither 
Milton was known to be coming at a certain hour. 
At the sound of his voice in the next room she rushed 
in upon him, threw herself at his feet, and begged to 
be forgiven. It was all her mother's fault, she said. 
The poet's great heart asked for no explanation ; it 
was enough for her to come back now, the past need 
never be mentioned. To crown his generosity he 
even took that froward mother-in-law into his house, 
and thenceforth had pretty much the whole Powell 
family on his hands for some years. In 1652 Mary 
Milton died, leaving three daughters, who all lived to 



6o JOHN MILTON 

grow up. From his return to England until 1646 
Milton had earned money by teaching private pupils ; 
in 1646 the death of his father, whom he tenderly loved, 
left him a comfortable fortune. 

In 1649, after the execution of the king, Milton ac- 
cepted the post of Latin Secretary to the government 
of the Commonwealth, and in that position he remained 
until after the death of Cromwell. His duties were 
chiefly translating despatches and writing Latin letters, 
but he was incidentally called upon for much more 
than this. A royalist book appeared, entitled " Eikon 
Basilike," or the " Royal Image " ; it purported to have 
been written by the late king, and its object was to 
stimulate the sentiment which had been shocked by 
his execution. In its pages Charles I. appears as a 
saint and martyr, and some of its tearful readers blas- 
phemously likened him to Jesus Christ. The book 
went through forty-seven editions. It was written 
by a Dr. Gauden, whom Charles II. afterward re- 
warded with a bishopric ; but everybody, save the half- 
dozen who knew the secret, believed it to be the work 
of Charles I. So thought Milton himself when he 
demolished it in his pamphlet entitled " Eikonoklastes," 
or the " Image Breaker," the tone of which may be in- 
ferred from a motto on the title-page, " As a roaring 
lion and a ranging bear, so is a wicked ruler over the 
poor people" (Prov. xxviii. 15). 

Dr. Gauden's book, being in English, could not 
reach many readers on the Continent, and young 
Charles, who was then living in Holland, intrusted 
the defence of his father to the celebrated Salmasius, 
professor at Leyden, generally regarded as the best 
Latinist in Europe. The book of Salmasius, called 



JOHN MILTON 6 1 

a " Defence of the King," was answered by Milton's 
Latin treatise, called a " Defence of the English Peo- 
ple," which was probably read by every educated man 
and woman in every corner of Europe. It was a de- 
fence of the people for executing their king for treason. 
The question is one on which conflicting views are 
still maintained ; but the number of those who would 
hold the king guiltless and call him a martyr has 
greatly diminished and is still diminishing, since we 
know that he was capable of allying himself with any 
party whatever for the sake of his personal ends. In 
these days we find no difficulty in realizing that a king 
who uses military force to overthrow the constitutional 
liberties of the people is guilty of treason and amenable 
to its consequences. The chief criticism now brought 
against the execution of Charles I. is that it instantly 
gave his son a claim to the throne and thus created 
further disturbance. Cromwell and his party were 
not ignorant of this danger, but they had to choose 
between it and the other danger of making further 
compacts with a king upon whose plighted word no 
man could for a moment rely. They believed that the 
latter danger was the greater, and they slew the king, 
not in vindictiveness, but as a measure of public safety. 
In Milton's book, however, we catch yet another note, 
a stern and grim one : let it be a warning to tyrants 
all over the world. One can fancy the shiver with 
which royalists everywhere must have read such star- 
tling doctrines. 

Milton's love and admiration for the mighty Oliver 
were never shaken. The two men were much alike 
for downright honesty and unsullied patriotism, also 
for breadth of mind and disdain of petty considera- 



62 JOHN MILTON 

tions. Their ideas of toleration and absolute freedom 
were immeasurably above the level of contemporary 
Puritan opinion. The greatest of Milton's prose 
works is his " Areopagitica," a defence of freedom of 
speech and of the press. It is one of the immortal 
glories of English literature. 

In leaving with this scanty mention the subject of 
Milton's prose writings, a word must be said of his 
style. It is the prose of a poet, impassioned and 
gorgeous, often stiff and heavy with ornament, like 
cloth of gold. In his time the virtue of conciseness 
had not been learned. Milton's sentences are apt to 
be so long and cumbrous as to tax the attention. The 
command of words is well-nigh unequalled. Urbanity 
is often conspicuously absent. It was a great crisis of 
humanity in which the combatants paid small heed to 
politeness. Epithets were hurled at Milton like 
showers of barbed arrows, and his retorts were quick 
and deadly. Stateliness never deserted him, but, as 
with George Washington, the white heat of his wrath 
was such as to make strong men tremble. Pattison 
somewhere says that in his passionate eloquence the 
English and Latin sentences creak like the timbers of 
a ship in a storm. 

At that time Milton wrote no poetry save now and 
then some grand sonnets, among which those of Vane 
and Cromwell, and on the Massacre of Piedmont, are 
among the finest. The year 1658, his fiftieth year, 
was a sad one in the poet's life. His second wife, to 
whom he had been married little more than a year, 
suddenly died. Soon afterward died Cromwell, and 
with him Milton's dreams for the immediate future of 
England. For a long time Milton's sight had been 



JOHN MILTON 5^ 

defective. Blindness had come on in his forty-fourth 
year, and it was now confessed to be incurable. The 
appearance of his eyes had not changed, but all sight 
was gone. He was then beginning to work steadily 
upon " Paradise Lost." 

In two years more came Charles II., and then the 
headsman's axe was busy. Milton had to hide for his 
life, but was arrested and kept for several weeks in 
prison. While there, he could hear the dismal story 
of friends and companions beheaded and quartered. 
In that cruel time how did the man escape who had 
been the mouthpiece of the rebel government ? When 
even the lifeless body of Cromwell was taken from the 
grave and hung on the gallows at Tyburn, what mercy 
could be hoped for the man who defended the regicides 
before, all Europe.? Professor Masson tells in^'detail 
how skilfully the affair was managed, when the least 
slip would have sent Milton to the scaffold. My own 
impression is that Clarendon, himself a scholar and 
historian, could not quite bear to see England's great- 
est scholar put to a shocking death. But if Milton had 
not been blind and helpless, I doubt if anything would 
have saved him from the fate of Sir Henry Vane. 

After his release Milton lived the remaining fourteen 
years of his life in London. His third wife, to whom 
he was married in 1663, survived him for many years. 
Their life seems to have been happy. The blind man 
needed constant help in his literary work. Sometimes 
young men would gladly come and serve as readers 
and scribes for the sake of his society and talk ; some- 
tmies his grown-up daughters were pressed into the 
work. The eldest went scot-free because she stam- 
mered ; but Mary and Dorothy were taught the Greek 



64 JOHN MILTON 

and Hebrew letters, and had to read aloud by the hour 
from books of which they understood not a word. 
Dorothy always spoke of him with warm affection, but 
Mary was once heard to wish he was dead. 

The Puritan poet felt that he had fallen on evil days. 
He could not see, as we do, that the good in Cromwell's 
work was really permanent, and that the impulse given 
by Puritanism was never to die. In the vile reign of 
Charles II., it must have seemed as if all virtue were 
dethroned and the sons of Belial let loose upon the 
earth. There is a tone of sadness, though not of 
sourness, about Milton's last years. He was never 
sullen or fretful. Macaulay is right in speaking of his 
" majestic patience." But I do not see what Macaulay 
could have been thinking of when he wrote of Milton 
as " retiring to his hovel to die." He had lost heavily 
by investing money in Commonwealth securities, which 
the Stuart government naturally refused to redeem. 
His condition thenceforth, says Masson, was not one 
of poverty but of "frugal gentility." The house in 
which he lived for twelve years and in which he died 
was by no means a hovel, and on the income from his 
property, such as it was, he maintained his family. Part 
of the furniture of the house was a good organ, and on 
it the blind man would play by the hour together, while 
the verses of " Paradise Lost " were taking shape in his 
mind. That great poem, with its successors, " Paradise 
Regained " and " Samson Agonistes," were written in 
that house ; and thither came visitors from all parts 
of Europe, as to a sacred shrine. He who had so long 
been known as scholar and charming poet lived long 
enough to find men ranking him among the foremost 
poets of all time. His latter days were molested by 



JOHN MILTON 65 

gout, which at length proved fatal. On a Sunday 
night in November, 1674, he passed away so quietly 
that his friends in the room did not know when he 
died. 

" Paradise Lost," like Dante's great poem, the only 
one with which it can be compared, was the outcome 
of many years of meditation. As a young man Milton 
thought of writing an epic poem, and he took much 
time in selecting a subject. For a while the legends 
of King Arthur attracted him, as they have fascinated 
Tennyson and so many other poets. In the course 
of his studies of early British history and legend, he 
was led to write a " History of England," to the year 
1066, in one volume. After a while he abandoned this 
idea. The subject of an epic poem must be one of 
wide interest. Homer and Virgil dealt with the 
legendary beginnings of national history. If a national 
subject, like the Arthur legends, were not adopted, 
something of equal or wider interest must be pre- 
ferred ; and the choice of the Puritan poet naturally 
fell upon the story of the " Creation and Fall of Man." 
The range of such a subject was limited only by that 
of the poet's own vast stores of knowledge. No theme 
could be loftier, none could afford greater scope for 
gorgeous description, none could sound the depths of 
human experience more deeply, none could appeal more 
directly to the common intelligence of all readers in 
Christendom. Of all these advantages Milton made 
the most, and " Paradise Lost " has been the epic of 
the Christian world, the household book in many a 
family and many a land where Puritanism has not 
otherwise been honoured. As Huxley once remarked, 
the popular theory of creation, which Lyell and Darwin 



66 JOHN MILTON 

overthrew, was founded more upon " Paradise Lost " 
than upon the Bible. 

There is a tradition that Milton preferred his 
" Paradise Regained " to " Paradise Lost." The 
poem is much less generally read. Its main theme 
is the temptation of Christ in the wilderness, and it 
affords no such scope for picturesqueness as its prede- 
cessor. Its greatness consists in the sustained loftiness 
of the thought and the organ-like music of the verse. 
There is a Greek severity and simplicity about it, as 
also in the drama of the blind Samson, the last mighty 
work of the Puritan poet. 

A treatise of Milton's on Christian doctrine, which 
did not get published till 1825, confirmed the suspicion 
which some shrewd readers of " Paradise Lost " had 
entertained, that the poet's own theology, like that of 
Locke and Newton, was Unitarian. In this, as in 
some other ways, he was far from being in touch with 
the Puritans of his time. 

In the spiritual life of modern times there have 
been two great uplifting tendencies, one derived from 
the Bible, the other from the study of Greek. The 
former tendency produced the Protestant Reformation, 
the latter produced what we call the Renaissance or 
New Birth of art and science. The spirit of the 
Reformation animated the Puritans as a class. But 
Milton was as much a child of the Renaissance as of i 
the Reformation ; there was in him as much of the 
Greek as of th6 Hebrew. The limits of Puritanism i| 
were too narrow for him. 

By common consent of educated mankind three 
poets — Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare — stand 
above all others. For the fourth place there are com-i 



JOHN MILTON 57 

petitors: two Greeks, .^schylus and Sophocles; two 
Romans, Lucretius and Virgil; one German, Goethe. 
In this high company belongs John Milton, and there 
are many who woul4 rank him first after the un- 
equalled three. 



Ill 

THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 



Ill 

THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

To any one looking superficially at a map of North 
America in the year 1755, it might well have seemed 
that, of the three great nations which had competed 
for the possession of the continent, the foremost posi- 
tion had been firmly secured by France. Certainly in 
geographical extent the French domain held the first 
place. From the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes, 
and northward to Hudson Bay, stretched the French 
province of Canada. From Lake Champlain slanting 
through central New York to where Pittsburg now 
stands, then following the Alleghanies down to east- 
ern Tennessee, and slanting again in a somewhat arbi- 
trary line to Mobile Bay, ran the eastern boundary of 
French Louisiana. The western limits of this huge 
province were ill defined, but they extended in theory 
to the sources of the Missouri; and in a north and 
south line Louisiana comprehended everything from 
Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico. Nor was the 
control of France over this territory merely nominal, 
at least so far as the portion east of the Mississippi is 
concerned. Though the settlements of the French 
were but few and far between, they were placed with 
admirable skill, both for commercial and for strategic 
purposes. Each settlement, besides forming the nucleus 
of a lucrative trade, was a strong military centre from 
which the allegiance of surrounding Indian tribes might 

71 



72 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

be enforced, and at that time the power of the Indians 
had not yet ceased to be formidable. 

In contrast with this immense domain, the strip of 
EngHsh settlements along the Atlantic coast would 
have seemed quite narrow and insignificant. In New 
York the frontier was at Johnson Hall, not far from 
Schenectady ; in Pennsylvania it was at Carlisle ; 
farther south the advance from the coast toward the 
interior had been even less considerable. Moreover, 
as far as military purposes were concerned, these colo- 
nies would seem to have been as badly organized as 
possible. Divided into thirteen distinct and indepen- 
dent governments, owning a varying and ill-defined 
allegiance to the British crown, it was next to impos- 
sible to secure concerted military action among them. 
Even in any single colony the raising of troops re- 
quired so much discussion in the legislature, and so 
much wrangling over local or sectarian interests, that 
the assailant was as likely as not to have delivered his 
blow and got off scot-free before any force was in 
readiness to thwart or punish him. Besides this, the 
English colonists were preeminently a peace-loving peo- 
ple, occupied almost entirely with their own domestic 
affairs; they had as little as possible to do with the 
Indians, and for the present, at least, had no far-reach- 
ing designs upon the interior of the continent : whereas 
the French, on the other hand, had a perfectly well- 
defined military policy, and bent all their energies 
toward maintaining and consolidating the supremacy 
over the country which they seemed already to have 
acquired. 

Nevertheless, within eight years from the time we 
have taken for our survey, the French did not possess 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 73 

a single rood of land in the whole of North America ; 
and except for a few months at the beginning of the 
nineteenth century, they have never since held any 
territory here. Moreover, the fall of the French 
power was at once admitted to be as irretrievable as 
it was sudden ; and since the first fatal catastrophe it 
has never shown even so much vitality as would have 
been implied in a serious attempt to recover its lost 
prestige. The causes of this striking phenomenon are 
worthy of consideration. 

It has often been observed that of all the modern 
nations which have sought to reproduce and perpet- 
uate their social and political institutions by coloniz- 
ing the savage regions of the earth, England is the 
only one which has achieved signal and lasting suc- 
cess. For this remarkable fact various causes may be 
assigned ; but I think we shall find the principal cause 
to lie in the circumstance that in England alone, 
among the great European nations, both individual 
liberty and local self-government have always been 
preserved; whereas elsewhere — and notably in the 
France of the Old Regime, with which our compari- 
son is here chiefly concerned — these indispensable 
elements of national vitality had been, by the seven- 
teenth century, almost completely lost. To under- 
stand this point fully, we must go back far into the 
past, and inquire for a moment into the origin of 
despotic government. 

The great problem of civilization is how to secure 
sufficient uniformity of belief and action among men 
without going so far as to destroy variety of belief and 
action. A world peopled with savages and barba- 
rians like ancient North America is incapable of much 



74 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

progress, because it is impossible to secure concerted 
action on a large scale, and so the powers of men are 
frittered away in labours which tend toward no com- 
mon result. The initial difficulty in civilizing a sav- 
age world is to get a large number of its savages to 
work together, for generation after generation, in ac- 
cordance with some general system, for the subjuga- 
tion of surrounding savages and the establishment of 
a permanent community. Unless some such long- 
enduring concert of action can be secured, a settled 
form of civilization cannot be attained ; but the his- 
tory of such a country — as in the case of ancient 
North America — will be an endless series of trivial 
and useless wars. The nations which in early times 
have become civilized and peaceful have become so 
through the military superiority which the power of 
permanently concerted action entails ; but this great 
advantage has generally been attended by a disadvan- 
tage. In most of these early civilized nations the 
forces which tend to make the whole community 
think and act alike have been so far encouraged that 
the result has been absolute despotism. Not political 
and ecclesiastical despotism simply, but underlying 
these a social despotism which in course of time 
moulds all the members of the community upon the 
same model, so that their characters become monoto- 
nously alike. The chief types of this kind of civiliza- 
tion are China and ancient Egypt, but all the civilized 
nations of Asia have been characterized by this sort 
of despotism. The result, of course, is immobility. 
When the whole community has come to think and 
feel and behave in the same way, every expression of 
dissent, every attempt at innovation, is at once crushed 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 75 

out ; or, rather, such uniformity of belief and behaviour 
is attained only after all dissent and innovation have 
been crushed out ; and of course in such a community 
no further progress is possible. 

If our principal subject were the philosophy of 
European history-, it would be interesting and profit- 
able to inquire into the circumstances which have 
enabled the nations of Europe to get over the initial 
difficulty of civilization and secure the benefits of con- 
certed action without going so far as to crush out 
variation in belief and conduct. As it is, we must 
content ourselves with observing that in this sort of 
compromise has consisted the peculiar progressiveness 
of European civilization. The different nations of 
Europe have solved the problem with very different 
degrees of success, — England and Spain affording the 
two extreme instances, — but none have quite failed in 
it like the nations of Asia. There have been despot- 
isms in Europe, but nothing like the despotism of 
Assyria or Persia. The papacy never quite became a 
caliphate, though some of the popes may have done 
their best to make it so. Neither Philip II. nor 
Louis XIV. was quite a sultan, however it might 
have tickled their fancy to be thought so. 

Nevertheless, the tendency toward Asiatic despotism 
has asserted itself very strongly at various epochs of 
European history, usually, perhaps, as the result of 
prolonged military pressure from without. The ten- 
dency increased quite steadily in the Roman Empire 
from the time of the earliest Germanic invasions until 
the culmination of the Byzantine era ; and the tradi- 
tions of this despotism were inherited by the Roman 
Church. In Germany, the operation of the tendency 



76 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

has been delayed in great part by the same causes 
which have retarded the unification of the country. 
In Spain, it had proceeded so far in the sixteenth cen- 
tury as to produce a national torpor, from which the 
Spaniards have not yet succeeded in arousing them- 
selves. In France, a somewhat similar process went 
on until, in the eighteenth century, it was checked by 
the influx of English ideas, which prepared the way 
for the great Revolution. In England, the tendency 
toward absolutism was always much weaker than any- 
where else, but it was strong enough in the seven- 
teenth century to bring about the migration of 
Puritans to America, and afterward the great Re- 
bellion, and finally the Revolution of 1688. In these 
and other instances, however, where it has asserted 
itself in England, the tendency has been so weak as 
to be promptly checked. There has never been a 
time in English history when free thinking on politi- 
cal and religious subjects has been quite suppressed. 
Of all the great European nations, England alone has 
succeeded in reaching a high stage of civilization with- 
out seriously impairing the political freedom which 
was once the common possession of the Aryan people 
by whom Europe was last settled. 

The consequences of this have been very great. 
After the initial difificulties of civilization have once 
been clearly surmounted, there can be no question that 
diversity of opinion and variety of character are of the 
greatest importance for the development of a rich and 
powerful national life. Other things equal, the fore- 
most place in civilization must inevitably be seized 
and maintained by the nation which most sedulously 
cherishes and encourages variety. Such a nation will 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE ']^ 

be more inventive than others, more prompt to meet 
sudden emergencies, more buoyant in recovering from 
calamity ; its people will be more easily adaptable to 
all sorts of climates and situations, more ready to 
engage in all kinds of activity, more fertile in expedi- 
ents, and more self-reliant in character. The nation, 
on the other hand, which systematically seeks to 
enforce uniformity of disposition among its members 
— which kills out all nonconformists or drives them 
beyond its borders — is sure, in proportion to its suc- 
cess, to sink into an inferior position in the world. 
The establishment of the Inquisition in Spain and 
the expulsion of the Moriscoes were the two greatest 
calamities which any nation ever voluntarily inflicted 
upon itself. The evil wrought by the violent expul- 
sion of the Moriscoes, involving as it did the sudden 
downfall of several of the principal industries of the 
country, is plain enough to every student of history. 
But the deadly Inquisition, working quietly and 
steadily year after year while fourteen generations 
lived and died, unquestionably wrought still greater 
evil. The Inquisition was simply a great machine for 
winnowing out and destroying all such individuals as 
surpassed the average of the nation in quickness of 
wit and in strength of character, so far as to entertain 
opinions of their own and to be bold enough to declare 
those opinions. The machine worked with such ter- 
rible efficiency that it was next to impossible for such 
people to escape it. They were strangled and burned 
by tens of thousands ; and as the inevitable result, 
the average character of the Spanish people has been 
lowered. The brightest and boldest have been cut 
off, while the dullest and weakest have been spared 



y8 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

to propagate the race ; and accordingly the Spaniard 
of the nineteenth century is, as compared with his 
contemporaries, a less intelligent and less enterprising 
person than the Spaniard of the sixteenth century. 
In the march of progress this people has fallen be- 
hind all the other peoples of Europe, and it is very 
doubtful whether the damage thus done can ever be 
repaired. For the competition among nations is so 
constant and so keen, that when a people has once 
clearly and unmistakably lost its hold upon the fore- 
most position, it is not very likely to regain it. It is 
so in the struggle for existence that goes on per- 
petually between species of plants and brute animals. 
It is equally so in the case of races of men, and his- 
tory abounds with examples of it. 

In similar wise, by his stupid persecution of the 
Huguenots, Louis XIV. simply robbed France of a 
rich and important element in its national life, and 
what France thus irreparably lost was gained by the 
Protestant countries of Europe and by the English 
colonies in America. To Massachusetts, to New 
York, and to South Carolina, the Huguenot settlers, 
being picked men, added a strength out of all propor- 
tion to their mere numbers, and to England and 
Germany they did likewise. During the reign of 
Louis XIV. more than a million Huguenots would 
seem to have left France, including the three hundred 
thousand who emigrated immediately after the revoca- 
tion of the Edict of Nantes. The whole population 
of France was then about fourteen millions, so that 
here was a direct loss of seven per cent of the people 
of the country. But mere figures can give no idea of 
the extent of the damage, for the people who left the ■ , 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 79 

kingdom were not thick-headed peasants. They were 
mostly skilled and quick-witted artisans, — paper- 
makers, workers in iron, weavers of linen and wool, 
manufacturers of finest silks and laces. Among them 
were eloquent preachers and learned writers, and some 
of the most thoroughly trained soldiers and seamen 
that France had ever possessed, insomuch that the 
royal navy was for a time well-nigh paralyzed by their 
departure. Wherever they went their nimble fingers, 
quick eyes, and ready wits insured them cordial wel- 
come. But even in this statement we do not realize 
how greatly France has suffered by losing them. It 
is a common opinion to-day among English-speaking 
people that the French character is to some extent 
wanting in earnestness and sincerity. Generalizations 
of this sort about national characteristics are apt to be 
untrustworthy, and one can hardly venture to say con- 
fidently how far this opinion about the French people 
may be true. No higher or nobler individual types of 
sincerity and earnestness can anywhere be found than 
some that France can show us, as, for instance, in the 
statesman Malesherbes and the scholar Littre. And 
among the common people it is by no means seldom 
that one meets the earnest, simple-hearted, unselfish 
goodness of the watchmaker Melchior Goulden in 
Erckmann-Chatrian's charming story of the Conscript. 
To charge the French, as a people, with frivolousness 
and insincerity is to do them gross injustice. Still, 
at the bottom of the English prejudice there lies, no 
doubt, a grain of truth. The Huguenot type of char- 
acter, in its intense earnestness and uncompromising 
truthfulness, was like the Puritan type. What the 
Puritan has been to England the Huguenot might 



8o THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

have been to France could he have stayed and thriven 
there. Had the Puritans been driven from England, 
we can readily see that the average character of the 
English people, as regards sincerity and earnestness, 
would have been inevitably lowered. And it is im- 
possible that France should have lost out of its popu- 
lation so large a portion as seven per cent, selected 
precisely because of its signal preeminence in earnest- 
ness and sincerity, without seriously affecting the 
average character of the people for many generations 
to come. 

From these examples we may see that the dangers 
arising from the expulsion of nonconformists are 
many and profound. The evil consequences of such 
a policy are innumerable, and they ramify in countless 
directions. Such a policy had been intermittently 
pursued in France ever since the Albigensian horrors 
of the thirteenth century. But in the worst days of 
English history no such policy has ever prevailed. 
The acts against the Lollards, and the brief agony in 
the reign of Mary Tudor, were weak and ineffectual. 
The burning of heretics began in England in 1401, 
and ended in 161 1. During those two hundred and 
ten years the total number of persons put to death was 
about four hundred. Of these executions about three 
hundred occurred in the years 1 555-1 557, under Mary 
Tudor, leaving a total of one hundred for the rest of 
the two centuries. The contrast to what went on in 
other countries is startling. No great body of people 
has ever been violently expelled from England, so that 
its peculiar type of character has been subtracted from 
the subsequent life of the nation. On the contrary, 
ever since the days of the Plantagenets it has been a 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 8 1 

maxim of English law — often violated, no doubt, in 
evil times, but still forever recognized as a guiding 
principle — that whosoever among the hunted and 
oppressed of other realms should set his foot on the 
sacred soil of Britain became forthwith free, and en- 
titled to all the protection that England's strong arm 
could afford. On that hospitable soil all types of 
character, all varieties of temperament, all shades of 
belief, have flourished side by side, and have interacted 
upon one another until there has been evolved the 
most plastic, the most energetic, the most self-reliant, 
the most cosmopolitan race of men that has yet lived 
on the earth. 

These considerations begin to make it apparent why 
a people like the English, encountering a people like 
the French in some new part of the world, would natu- 
rally overcome or supplant it. Another circumstance 
implied in the same group of considerations will make 
this still more apparent. I said just now that the 
English alone have succeeded in working up to a 
highly complex form of civilization without essentially 
departing from the primitive Aryan principle of gov- 
ernment. What we may call the " town-meeting prin- 
ciple," with which we are so familiar as the logical 
basis of our own American political institutions, was 
essentially the principle on which the early Aryan 
communities governed themselves. The great puzzle 
of nation-making has always been how to secure con- 
certed action on a grand scale without sacrificing this 
principle of local self-government. The political fail- 
ure of ancient Greece was the failure to secure con- 
certed action on a sufificiently large scale. Rome 
succeeded in securing concert of action, but in so 

2 G 



82 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

doing sacrificed to a great extent the principle of local 
self-government. The Roman government came to 
be a close corporation, administering the affairs of the 
empire through prefects and subprefects ; and when 
we say that the Teutonic invasions infused new life 
into Roman Europe, I suppose what we chiefly mean 
is that the Germans reintroduced to some extent the 
" town-meeting principle," and strengthened the sense 
of local and personal independence. In England the 
principle of local self-government became so deeply 
rooted that it survived the overthrow of the feudal 
system ; but in France — the most thoroughly Roman- 
ized country in Europe — it never acquired a very 
firm foothold, and the overthrow of the feudal system 
there resulted in government by a close corporation 
and prefects, not altogether unlike that of the Roman 
Empire. 

Now, it is one characteristic of these highly central- 
ized forms of government by prefects that they are not 
easily transplanted. They are highly artificial forms 
of government, in so far as they are the products of 
very peculiar combinations of circumstances operating 
for a long while in a particular country. When taken 
away from the peculiar sets of circumstances in which 
they have originated, and introduced into a new field, 
they fall into decay, unless kept up by support from 
without. There is no natural principle of life within 
them. On the other hand, the town meeting, or the 
assembly of heads of families, is, so to speak, the pri- 
mordial cell out of which the tissue of political life has 
been originally woven among all races and nations. 
The civilized government which has learned how to 
secure concerted action without forsaking this pri- 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 83 

mordial principle contains an element of permanence 
which is independent of peculiar local circumstances. 
Whithersoever transplanted, it will take root and 
flourish. It has all the reproductive vitality of cellular 
tissue, whereas the centralized bureaucracy is as rigid 
and unplastic as cartilage or bone. 

The force of these considerations is nowhere better 
illustrated than in the contrasted fortunes of the French 
and English settlements in North America. The 
French colonies, as we have observed, were planted in 
accordance with a far-reaching imperial policy, and 
they were favoured by the especial solicitude of the 
home government, which well understood their value, 
and was bitterly chagrined when it became necessary 
to part with them. Louis XIV. in particular, whose 
long reign covered something like half of the brief his- 
tory of New France, thought very highly of his Amer- 
ican colonies, and laboured industriously to promote 
their welfare. One of his pet schemes was to repro- 
duce in the New World the political features of French 
society in Europe, modifying them only so far as it 
was necessary in order to secure in the New France a 
bureaucratic despotism even more ideally complete 
than that which had grown up in the old country. By 
a reminiscence of vanquished feudalism the land was 
parcelled out in seigniories, but the management of 
affairs was in the hands of a viceroy, or governor-gen- 
eral appointed by the king. The instructions of the 
governor were prepared with extreme prolixity and 
minuteness by the king and his ministers ; and to in- 
sure his carrying them out in every particular another 
officer was appointed, called the intejidant, whose prin- 
cipal business was to keep an eye on the governor, and 



84 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

tell tales about him to the minister of state at home. 
Another part of the intendant's duty was to travel 
about the colony and pry into the affairs of every 
household, in order that whatever was wrong might be 
set right, and the wants of the people provided for. 
We can imagine the wrath and the hooting which 
such an ofHcial would have provoked in any English 
colony that ever existed ; but in Canada this sort of 
thing was thought to be quite proper. No enterprise 
of any sort was undertaken without an appeal to the 
king for aid. Bounties were attached to all kinds of 
trades, in order to encourage them, and at the same 
time it was attempted to prescribe, as far as possible, 
the exact percentage of profit which might be legally 
earned. If people .got out of work, they were to be 
supplied with work at the cost of the government. In 
order to foster a taste for ship-building, the king had 
ships built at his own expense ; yet at the same time 
the ships which came over from France often went 
home empty, save those which by royal edict were 
allowed to carry furs or lumber. In order to encour- 
age the raising of hemp, it was proposed that all hemp 
grown within the colony should be purchased by the 
king at a high price. To encourage agriculture in 
general, the king sent over seeds of all sorts to be dis- 
tributed among the farmers gratis, while the intendant 
went about to see that the seeds were duly planted. 
While native industry was thus sedulously fostered, 
foreign trade was absolutely prohibited. No mild pro- 
hibitory tariff, such as our modern protectionists 
advocate, was resorted to, but foreign goods were 
seized wherever found and solemnly burned in the 
streets. The interests of landed property were also 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 85 

looked after. As it is inconvenient that farms should 
be too small, no one living in the open country was 
to build a house on any piece of land less than a cer- 
tain prescribed size, under penalty of seeing his house 
torn down at the next visit of the intendant. That 
the morals of these favoured farmers might remain 
uncorrupted by the splendid vices of great cities, they 
were forbidden to go to Quebec without permission 
from the intendant, and any one in the city who should 
let rooms to them was to be fined a hundred livres, for 
the benefit of the hospitals. In 1710 the inhabitants 
of Montreal were prohibited from owning more than 
two horses or mares, and one foal apiece, on the 
ground that if they raised too many horses they would 
not raise enough cattle and sheep ! 

With a thousand such arbitrary and foolish, though 
well-meant, regulations the people of Canada were 
hampered and restricted, so that, in spite of the natural 
advantages of the country for agriculture, for fisheries, 
and for the fur trade, there was nothing surprising in 
the facts that business of every kind languished and 
that the population increased but slowly. The slow- 
ness of increase of the population early attracted the 
attention of the French government, which laboured 
earnestly to counteract the evil. No inhabitant of 
Canada was allowed to visit the English colonies or 
to come home to France without express permission. 
Emigrants for Canada were diligently enlisted in 
France, and sent over in ship-loads every year, being 
paid bounties for going. Women were sent over in 
companies of two or three hundred at a time, all care- 
fully sorted and selected as to social position, so that 
nobles, officers, bourgeois, and peasants might each 



86 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

find wives to suit them ; and each of these prospective 
brides brought with her a dowry paid by the benevo- 
lent king. The arrival of these women was generally 
preceded or accompanied by a royal order that all 
bachelors in the colony must get married within two 
weeks, under penalty of not being allowed to hunt, or 
catch fish, or trade with the Indians. Every father of 
a family who had unmarried sons over twenty years of 
age, or unmarried daughters over sixteen, was subject 
to a fine unless he could show good cause for his 
delinquency. The father of ten children received 
a pension of three hundred livres a year for the rest 
of his life, while he who had twelve received four hun- 
dred, and people in the upper ranks of society who 
had fifteen children were rewarded with twelve hun- 
dred livres. Yet, in spite of all these elaborate devices, 
the white population of Canada, at the end of the reign 
of Louis XIV., in 1715, and more than a century after 
the founding of the colony, did not reach a total of 
twenty-five thousand. 

However absurd such a system of administration 
may seem to us, it was, after all, only the unflinching 
application of a theory of protective government which 
has had very wide currency in the world, and has found 
too many defenders even in our own self-governing 
community. The contemporary administration of af- 
fairs in France was characterized by many similar 
errors, and was followed, indeed, in the course of 
another century, by a terrible spasm of financial ruin 
and social anarchy. Yet there is one important dif- 
ference between the results of paternal government 
administered by a centralized bureaucracy in the coun- 
try where it has grown up and in the country to which 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 87 

it is transplanted. In the native country of the bureau- 
cracy a great many of the affairs of Hfe are conducted 
in accordance with usages established by immemorial 
custom. Such usages have a certain presumption in 
their favour, as adapted in some degree to the circum- 
stances of the country; the bureaucracy must be to 
some extent checked or guided by them, and its capac- 
ity for mischief is so far limited. But when the same 
system of government is transplanted to a new country, 
its course of procedure is largely a matter of experi- 
ment in pursuance of some general ox a priori theory ; 
and experiments of this sort have always failed. No 
government that has ever yet existed has possessed 
enough wisdom to found a prosperous society by any 
amount of arbitrary administration. When, there- 
fore, the forms and machinery of a centralized despot- 
ism are sought to be reproduced away from their 
connections with the peculiar local traditions amid 
which they have grown up, it is but the dead husk 
that is transplanted instead of the living kernel. 

While the French colonies in America thus throve 
so feebly in spite of the anxious care of their sovereign, 
the English colonies, neglected and left to themselves, 
were full of sturdy life. The settlers had been accus- 
tomed to manage their own affairs at home, instead of 
having them managed by prefects and intendants. Had 
their king attempted to deal with them as the benevo- 
lent Louis XIV. dealt with his subjects, they would 
have cut off his head or driven him into exile. In 
America they conducted themselves very much as 
they would have done in England, save that they were 
much freer from interference. Having gone into vol- 
untary exile themselves, they were relieved from the 



88 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

necessity of beheading the king or driving him into 
exile, and all they asked was to be let alone. To 
sundry general commercial restrictions they submitted, 
especially so long as these restrictions were not en- 
forced, but in all important details each community 
managed its own affairs according to its own ideas of 
its own interests. 

In ecclesiastical policy the difference between the 
two peoples was as great as in their political and 
social life. Religion and the Church occupy as promi- 
nent a position in the history of Canada as in that of 
New England. There are few more heroic chapters 
in the annals of the Catholic Church than that which 
recounts the labours and the martyrdom of the Jesuits 
in North America. Already, before the death of 
Champlain, the Jesuits had acquired full control of the 
spiritual affairs of Canada. Their policy aimed at 
nothing less than the consolidation of the aboriginal 
tribes into a Christian state under the direct control of 
the followers of Loyola; and upon this hopelessly 
impracticable task they entered with an enthusiasm 
worthy of the noblest of the old crusaders. The char- 
acter of Maisonneuve claims a place in our affectionate 
remembrance by the side of Tancred and Godfrey de 
Bouillon. The charming chronicler Lejeune might 
be mated with the Sieur de Joinville. Nor was St. 
Louis himself inspired with a grander fervour than the 
black-robed priests of the Huron mission. The in- 
domitable Brebeuf, the delicate Lallemant, the long- 
suffering Jogues, may be ranked with the ancient 
martyrs of Christianity, and in their heroic lives and 
deaths the system of Loyola appeared in its brightest 
and purest light. Though thrown away upon the 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 89 

Indians, the work of the Jesuits was, after all, the one 
feature of Canadian polity which possessed sufficient 
merit to survive the British conquest. Their policy, 
nevertheless, involved the rigorous exclusion of all 
freedom of thought from the limits of the colony. No 
Huguenot was allowed to enter upon any terms. On 
the other hand, if we consider the Puritans alone, 
and recollect their treatment of the Quakers in Massa- 
chusetts and the Catholics in Maryland, we shall 
regard their conduct as hardly more politic or com- 
mendable than that of the Jesuits. But, if we consider 
the English colonies all together, the variety of opin- 
ion on religious questions was very great ; so great 
that when they came to constitute themselves into a 
united nation, the only common ground upon which 
they could possibly meet in ecclesiastical matters was 
one of unqualified toleration. The heretic in whose 
face Canada coldly shut the door might be sure of a 
welcome in one part of English America if not in 
another. 

With all these advantages in their favour, we need 
not be surprised at the solid and rapid increase of the 
English colonies. Yet the increase was surprising 
when compared with anything the world had ever seen 
before. We do not read that the king of England 
ever set bounties on large families, or provided wives 
for the settlers at his own expense. Yet by the year 
1750 — less than a century and a half from the settle- 
ment of Jamestown — the white population of the 
thirteen colonies had reached a million and a 
quarter. 

The contrast, therefore, with which we opened this 
chapter was but a superficial one. Great as were the 



90 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

territorial acquisitions of the French, their actual 
strength was by no means in proportion, and their 
project of confining the English behind the Alleghanies 
was as chimerical as would have been an attempt to 
stop the flow of the St. Lawrence. 

In carrying out their grand project the French relied 
largely upon their alliances with the Indians, and for 
this there was some show of reason. As a general 
thing the French were far more successful than the 
English in winning the favour of the savages. They 
treated them with a firmness and tact very different 
from the disdainful coldness of the English. They 
humoured and cajoled them, even while inspiring them 
with wholesome terror. The haughty and fiery Fron- 
tenac, most punctilious of courtiers, with the bluest 
blood of France flowing in his veins, at the age of 
seventy did not think it beneath his dignity to smear 
his cheeks with vermilion and caper madly about in 
the war-dance, brandishing a tomahawk over his head 
and yelling like a screech-owl or a cougar. Imagine 
Governor Winthrop or Governor Endicott acting such 
a part as this ! On the other hand, if an Indian was 
arrested for murdering a Frenchman, he was hanged 
in a trice by martial law, and such summary justice 
the Indians feared and respected. But when an Indian 
was arrested for murdering an Englishman, he was put 
upon his trial, with all the safeguards of the English 
criminal law, and such conscientious clemency the 
Indians despised as sentimental weakness. Captain 
Ecuyer — a Frenchman in the English service at the 
time of Pontiac's war — gave an excellent illustration 
of the Frenchman's native tact in dealing with his red 
brother. Ecuyer was in command of Fort Pitt — where 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 9 1 

Pittsburg now stands — and an attacking force of Dela- 
wares summoned him to surrender, with sugared words, 
assuring him that if he would retreat to CarHsle, they 
would protect him from some bad Indians in the neigh- 
bourhood who thirsted for his blood ; but if he stayed, 
they would not be responsible for the consequences. 
Ecuyer thanked them for their truly disinterested 
advice, but assured them that he did not care a rush 
for the bad Indians, and meant to remain where he 
was ; but, he added, " an army of six thousand pale- 
faces is now on the way hither, and another of three 
thousand has just gone up the lakes to annihilate 
Pontiac, so you had better be off. I have told you 
this in acknowledgment of your friendly counsels to 
me; but don't whisper it to those bad Indians, for 
fear they should run away from our deadly ven- 
geance ! " This story of the English armies was, of 
course, a lie of the first magnitude. The poor fellow 
had but a handful of men wherewith to repel his swarm 
of assailants, and he knew very well that any reenforce- 
ment was rather to be longed for than expected. But 
his adroit lie sent the savages away in a panic without 
further provoking their wrath, and so was worth much 
more than a successful battle. 

Skilful as the French usually were in their dealings 
with the savages, their position in the country was 
nevertheless such that at an early period they were 
brought into conflict with the most warlike of all the 
Indian tribes, and this circumstance interfered materi- 
ally with the success of the Canadian colony. In the 
seventeenth century the country east of the Mississippi, 
from the line of Tennessee and the Carolinas northward 
to Hudson Bay, was occupied by two families or races 



92 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

of Indians, differing radically from each other in their 
speech, and slightly in their physical characteristics. 
These were called by the French the Algonquin and 
Iroquois families. Our old New England acquaintances 
— the Pequods, Narragansetts, Mohegans, and Abe- 
nakis — were all Algonquins. The Delawares, who 
lived in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, were 
also Algonquins. So were the Shawnees of the Ohio, 
the Miamis of the Wabash, the Illinois, the Kickapoos 
of southern Wisconsin, the Pottawatomies and Ojib- 
was of Michigan, and the Ottawas of Michigan and 
Upper Canada. Lower Canada and Acadia were also 
inhabited by Algonquin tribes. In the central portion 
of this vast country, surrounded on every side by 
Algonquins, dwelt the Iroquois. The so-called Five 
Nations occupied the central portion of New York; 
to the south of them were the Andastes or Susque- 
hannocks ; the Fries lived on the southern shore of 
the lake which bears their name ; and the northern 
shore was occupied by a tribe known as the Neutral 
Nation. To the north of these came the Hurons. 
One Iroquois tribe — the Tuscaroras — lay quite apart 
from the rest, in North Carolina; but in 1715 this 
tribe migrated to New York, and joined the famous 
Iroquois league, which was henceforth known as the 
Six Nations. The Indians south of the Tennessee 
and Carolina line, such as the Creeks, Cherokees, 
Seminoles, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, belong to a 
third family — the Mobilian — distinct from the Algon- 
quins and Iroquois. The Natchez of the Lower 
Mississippi are supposed by some ethnologists to have 
been an intruding branch of the Mexican Toltecs. Far 
north, in Wisconsin, the well-known Winnebagos were 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 93 

also intruders ; they belonged to the Sioux or Dakota 
stock, whose home was then, as now, west of the great 
river. 

Between the Algonquins and the Iroquois were 
many important differences. They differed radically, 
as already observed, in their speech. They differed 
also in their modes of building their wigwams and 
fortifying their villages. The mythology of the 
Algonquins, moreover, was distinct from that of the 
Iroquois. There were many degrees of barbarism 
among the Algonquins, from the New England tribes, 
which cultivated the soil, down to the Ojibwas, who 
were very degraded and shiftless savages. But the 
Iroquois were superior to any of the Algonquins. 
They were somewhat finer in physical appearance, 
and they were better fighters. They are said to have 
had somewhat larger brains; they understood more 
about agriculture ; they were more capable of acting 
in concert. They were very well aware of their 
superiority, and looked down with ineffable contempt 
upon the Algonquins, by whom they were in turn 
regarded with an almost superstitious hatred and 
fear. 

Of all the Iroquois the most formidable in numbers, 
the bravest in war, and the shrewdest in diplomacy 
were the Five Nations of New York — the Mohawks, 
Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. The 
favourite Iroquois name for this mighty league is 
interesting. It was the custom of all the Iroquois 
tribes to build their wigwams very long and narrow. 
Sometimes an Iroquois house would be two hundred 
and fifty feet in length by thirty in width, with a door 
at each end. A narrow opening along the whole length 



94 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

of the roof let in the Hght and let out some of the 
smoke from the row of fires kindled on the ground 
beneath. A rude scaffolding ran along each side 
some three feet from the ground, and on this the 
inmates slept while their firewood was piled under- 
neath. In this way from twenty to thirty families 
might be lodged in a single wigwam. By a very 
picturesque metaphor the Iroquois of New York 
called their great confederacy the Long House. The 
Mohawks, at the Hudson River, kept the eastern door 
of the Long House, and the Senecas, at the Genesee, 
guarded the western door, while the central council fire 
burned in the valley of Onondaga, and was flanked to 
the right by the Oneidas, and to the left by the Cayugas. 
The ferocity of these New York Indians was as 
conspicuous as their courage, and their confederated 
strength made them more than a match for all their 
rivals — so that at the time of the first French and 
English settlements they were rapidly becoming the 
terror of the whole country. Turning their arms first 
against their own kindred, in 1649 they overwhelmed 
and nearly destroyed the tribe of Hurons, putting the 
Jesuit missionaries to death with frightful tortures. 
Next they exterminated the Neutral Nation. In 1655 
they massacred most of the Eries, and incorporated the 
rest among their own numbers; and in 1672, after a 
terrible war of twenty years, they completed the ruin 
of the Susquehannocks. At the same time they made 
much easier work of their Algonquin enemies. They 
drove the Ottawas from Canada into Michigan. They 
allied themselves with the Miamis, and overthrew the 
power of the Illinois in 1680, at the time when La 
Salle was making his adventurous journeys. They 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 95 

then turned upon the Miamis and defeated them, and 
drove the Shawnees a long way down the Ohio. Some 
time before this they had conquered the Delawares; 
and this circumstance should be taken into account in 
considering the remarkable success of Penn and his 
followers in keeping clear of Indian troubles. A con- 
ciliatory policy had no doubt something to do with 
this ; but it is not true that the Quakers were the only 
settlers who paid for their lands instead of taking them 
by force, for the Puritans of New England had done 
so in every case except that of the Pequods. It is 
worthy of consideration that, at the time when Penn- 
sylvania was colonized, the Delawares had been 
thoroughly humbled by the Iroquois, and forced into a 
treaty by which they submitted to be called " women " 
and to forego the use of arms. The price of the lands 
sold to Penn was paid twice over — to the Delawares, 
who actually occupied them, and again to the Iroquois, 
who had obtained them by conquest. Thus the vic- 
tors were kept in good humour, and the vanquished 
Indians did not dare to molest the Quaker settle- 
ments for fear of Iroquois vengeance. 

But the Iroquois had a deeper reason for wishing to 
keep on good terms with the English. As early as 
the time of Champlain they had been brought into 
deadly collision with the French, who certainly had 
not yet learned the importance of their friendship, and 
perhaps were not in a condition to secure it if they 
had. Settling first among the Algonquin tribes of 
the St. Lawrence, it was perhaps inevitable that the 
French should court the friendship of these tribes by 
defending them against their hereditary enemies. In 
1609 Champlain attacked the Mohawks near Ticon- 



96 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

deroga, and won an easy victory over savages who had 
never before beheld a white man or heard the report 
of a musket. From that time forth the Iroquois hated 
the French, and after the destruction of the Huron 
mission the French had good reason for reciprocating 
the hatred. In 1664 the Enghsh supplanted the 
Dutch in the control of the Hudson, and thus for the 
first time came into formidable proximity to Canada ; 
and now began the rivalry between French and Eng- 
lish which lasted for ninety-nine years. A sort of alli- 
ance naturally grew up between the English and the 
Five Nations, while, on the other hand, the French 
sought to control the policy of all the Algonquin 
tribes from the Penobscot to the Mississippi, and to 
bring them into the field against the dreaded warriors 
of the Long House. But there was a difference 
between these two alliances. The English valued 
the friendship of the Iroquois partly as a protection 
against Canada, partly as a means of gaining access to 
the lakes and obtaining a share in the fur trade ; but, 
in spite of all this, they took very little pains to con- 
ciliate their dusky allies, and generally left them to 
fight their own battles. On the other hand, the far- 
sighted policy of the French made firm allies of the 
Algonquin tribes and of the remnant of the Hurons, 
and taken together they were more than a match for 
the Iroquois. Yet for a long time the contest was by 
no means an unequal one. The Five Nations held 
their ground bravely, and at times seemed to be 
getting the best of it. They inflicted immense dam- 
age upon the Canadian settlements. From one end 
of the Long House the Mohawks were perpetually 
taking the war-path down Lake Champlain, while 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 



97 



from the other the Senecas interrupted the fur trade 
on the western lakes, and the central tribes infested 
the upper St. Lawrence. In the summer of 1689 they 
penetrated as far as Montreal, and shouted defiance to 
the garrison, while they laid waste the country for 
miles around, and roasted and devoured their pris- 
oners in full sight of the terror-stricken town. This 
achievement, however, marked the acme of their suc- 
cess and of their power. The next year they had to 
reckon with a skilful and indomitable soldier in the 
person of Count Frontenac, and the fates were no 
longer propitious to them. 

Frontenac had already been governor of New 
France for ten years, from 1672 to 1682. Court 
scandal said that he was a rival of Louis XIV. in the 
affections of Madame De Montespan, and that the 
jealous king had sent him over to America to get him 
out of the way. He was an able administrator and a 
man of large views. He even saw the desirableness 
of introducing an element of local self-government 
into the Canadian community, and strove to do so, 
though unsuccessfully. He sympathized with La 
Salle in his adventurous schemes, and aided them to 
the extent of his ability. Had he been properly sup- 
ported by the king, he might perhaps have carried out 
the bold suggestion of Talon, and wrested from the 
English their lately acquired province of New York, 
thus isolating New England, and materially strength- 
ening the grasp of France upon the American conti- 
nent. But he unwisely made enemies of the Jesuits, 
and his fiery temper and implacable stubbornness 
got him into so many quarrels that, in 1682, he was 
ordered home. Now, after seven years of neglect, 



98 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

he was reinstated by the king, and Canada welcomed 
him back as the only man who could save the country. 
No better man could have been chosen for the pur- 
pose. Though seventy years of age, he still retained 
something of the buoyancy of youth ; in dauntless 
courage and fertility of resource he was not unlike his 
friend La Salle; and he was quite unrivalled in his 
knowledge of the dark and crooked ways of the Indian 
mind. 

At Frontenac's arrival the enmities of all the hostile 
parties, both red and white, encamped upon American 
soil, were all at once allowed free play. The tyrant 
James II. had just been driven into exile at Versailles; 
and Louis XIV., unwilling to give up the check upon 
English policy which he had so long exercised through 
his ascendency over the mean-spirited Stuarts, and 
enraged beyond measure at the sudden accession of 
power now acquired by his arch-enemy, William of 
Orange — Louis XIV., who had but lately revoked 
the Edict of Nantes, and committed himself to a 
deadly struggle with all the liberal tendencies of the 
age, now declared war against England. This, of 
course, meant war in the New World as well as the 
Old, and left the doughty Frontenac quite unhampered 
in his plans for striking terror into the hearts of the 
foes of Canada. 

Frontenac's first proceeding was to send scalping 
parties against the English settlements, not merely to 
annoy the English, but also to retrieve in the minds 
of his Indian allies and enemies the somewhat shaken 
military reputation of the French. In February, 1690, 
a small party of Frenchmen and Algonquins from 
Montreal, after a difficult march of three weeks 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 99 

through the snow, surprised Schenectady at mid- 
night, and slaughtered some sixty of the inhabitants. 
In the following month a similar barbarous attack was 
made upon Salmon Falls, in New Hampshire; and 
shortly after, Fort Loyal, standing where now is the 
foot of India Street, in the city of Portland, experi- 
enced the same sort of treatment. This policy accom- 
plished so much that it was tried again. In 1692, 
York was laid in ashes, and one-third of the inhab- 
itants massacred. In 1694, two hundred and thirty 
Algonquins, led by one French oflficer and one Jesuit 
priest, surprised the village at Oyster River — now 
Durham, about twelve miles from Portsmouth — and 
murdered one hundred and four persons, mostly women 
and children. Some of the unhappy victims were burned 
alive. Emboldened by this success, the barbarians next 
attacked Groton, in Massachusetts, where they slew 
forty people. 

Similar incursions were made from year to year. A 
raid on Haverhill in 1697 has become famous through 
the bold exploit of a village Amazon. Hannah Dustin 
had seven days before given birth to a child, and lay 
in the farmhouse, waited on by her kindly neighbour, 
Mary Neff. Her husband was at work in a field hard 
by, having with him their seven children, of whom the 
youngest was but two years old. All at once the war- 
whoop sounded in Dustin's ears, and snatching his 
gun and leaping on his horse he galloped toward the 
farmhouse, when he saw that the Indians were there 
before him, so that his presence would be of no avail. 
Turning quickly back to the field, he thought to seize 
as many of the children as he could, and gallop away ; 
but when he looked upon the seven dear little faces 



lOO THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

he knew not which to choose. So, picking up the 
infant, he told the others all to run on before him 
through the open fields, while he walked his horse and 
kept firing Parthian shots at the Indians. Thus for 
more than a mile they made their way to a fortified 
house, while the prudent redskins, rather than follow 
an armed and desperate man, chose the pleasanter task 
of assailing defenceless women in their homes. The 
new-born babe they slung against a tree, dashing out 
its brains, and Mrs. Dustin and Mary Neff they 
dragged away into the forest, whither many of their 
friends and neighbours had already been taken. The 
savages, holding a council, proceeded to tomahawk 
many of their prisoners, and the rest they divided 
among one another as prizes to be taken home to 
Canada and tortured to death. Mrs. Dustin and her 
friend were assigned to a party consisting of two war- 
riors, three squaws, and seven young Indians, and with 
them there went an English boy from Worcester who 
had been captured some time before and understood 
the Algonquin language. These bloodthirsty savages 
were devout Catholics, brought into the Christian fold 
by Jesuit eloquence, and daily they counted over their 
rosaries and mumbled their guttural paternosters. To 
the natural delight which the Indian felt in roasting a 
captive, they could add the keener zest which thrilled 
the soul of the follower of Loyola in delivering up a 
heretic unto Satan. But Mrs. Dustin had no mind to 
yield herself to their horrid schemes. One night, 
while the Indians were sound asleep by their camp- 
fire in the depths of the New Hampshire forest, near 
the upper waters of the Merrimac, the two women and 
the boy rose silently and took each a tomahawk, and 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE lOI 

with swift and well-aimed blows crushed in the skulls 
of ten of their sleeping enemies. One little boy they 
spared ; one wrinkled squaw awoke betimes and fled 
screeching through the darkness. The ten dead sav- 
ages Mrs. Dustin scalped, and getting into a bark 
canoe the three doughty companions floated down 
the Merrimac till they reached the village of Haver- 
hill. The fame of their exploit went far and wide 
throughout the land. A bounty of ^50 was paid 
them for the ten scalps, and the governor of distant 
Maryland sent them a present in guerdon of their 
prowess. The ghastly story has never been forgot- 
ten, but is told to-day to all school children, though 
school children are not always taught to associate 
these incidents with Count Frontenac, or with the 
expulsion of the Stuart kings from Great Britain. 

Such barbarous warfare as this does not redound to 
the credit of Frontenac, though personally he seems to 
have been humane and generous according to the 
standards of his age and country. The delightful 
Jesuit historian, Charlevoix, recounts these massacres 
of the heretical Puritans with emphatic approval. In 
New England they awakened intense horror and in- 
dignation. It was resolved to attack Canada. In 
1690, after the massacres at Salmon Falls and Fort 
Loyal, two thousand Massachusetts militia, under Sir 
William Phips, actually sailed up the St. Lawrence 
and laid siege to Quebec ; while Winthrop, of Con- 
necticut, started from Albany to create a diversion on 
the side of Montreal. But these amateur generals 
were no match for Frontenac, and both expeditions 
returned home crestfallen with disastrous defeat. 
Massachusetts, loaded with a debt of fifty thousand 



I02 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

pounds, was obliged for a time to issue paper money. 
In the following year, Peter Schuyler, with a force of 
New York militia and Mohawks, descended Lake 
Champlain, and defeated the French in a fierce and 
obstinate battle ; but nothing came of the victory, and 
the end of the campaign left Frontenac master of the 
situation. 

Having thus successfully defied the English and 
won a mighty reputation among his Algonquin allies, 
the veteran governor was now prepared to chastise the 
Iroquois. In 1693 a small French army under Courte- 
manche overran the Mohawk country' and destroyed 
several towns, retreating after a drawn battle with Peter 
Schuyler. In 1696 Frontenac himself, at the head of 
two battalions of French regulars, eight hundred Cana- 
dian militia, and a swarm of screeching Hurons and 
Ottawas, crossed Lake Ontario, and battered down, so 
to speak, the centre of the Long House. Carried in 
triumph on the shoulders of the exulting Indians, the 
old general, now in his sevent}'-seventh year, advanced 
boldly into the sacred precincts of the Onondagas, 
whither white men had never yet set foot save as <, 
envoys on the most dangerous of missions, or as (] 
prisoners to be burned at the stake. Most of the 
Onondaga warriors fled in dismay, but their towns 
were utterly destroyed, all their winter stores captured, ,, 
and their whole country laid waste. A similar pun- » 
ishment was then inflicted upon the Oneidas, and the 
motley army returned to Canada, taking along with 
them a great number of war chiefs as hostages. In 
the following year the Iroquois, cowed by defeat and 
famine, sent an embassy to Quebec to see if they 
could make a separate peace with the French, without 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE I03 

engaging to keep their hands off the Algonquins. 
But Frontenac flung their wampum belt back into 
their faces, and demanded unconditional submission, 
under penalty of worse treatment than they had yet 
experienced. 

In February, 1698, the news of the peace of Rys- 
wick ended the war, so far as the French and EnHish 
were concerned. In November of the same year 
Frontenac died at Quebec, bitterly hated by his rivals 
and enemies, dreaded and admired by the Indians, 
idolized by the common people, and respected by all 
for his probity and his soldierly virtues. His stormy 
administration had been fruitful of benefits to Canada. 
By humbling the Iroquois the French ascendency 
over all the Indian tribes was greatly increased. 
During the merciless campaigns of the past ten years 
the Long House had lost more than half of its war- 
riors, and was left in such a state of dilapidation and 
dejection that Canada had but little to fear from it in 
future. In 1715 the fighting strength of the confed- 
eracy was partially repaired by the adoption of the 
• kindred tribe of the Tuscaroras, who had just been 
expelled from North Carolina by the English settlers, 
j and migrated to New York. After this accession the 
! Iroquois, henceforth known as the Six Nations, formed a 
i power by no means to be despised. But their haughty 
spirit was so far broken that they became accessible to 
the arts of French diplomacy, and at times they were 
almost persuaded to make common cause with the 
other Indian tribes against the English. That they 
did not finally forsake the English alliance was per- 
haps chiefly due to the extraordinary ascendency 
acquired over them by Sir William Johnson, an Irish- 



I04 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

man who came over to America in 1734, and settled 
in the Mohawk Valley, building two strongholds there, 
known as Johnson Castle and Johnson Hall. Ac- 
quiring wealth by trade with the Indians of New York, 
and political importance through his skill in manag- 
ing them, Johnson was made a major-general in 1755, 
and defeated the French at Lake George in that year, 
and at Niagara in 1759. He was made a baronet for 
his services, and died in 1774, as some say through 
grief at the impending prospect of war between his 
sovereign and his fellow-citizens. 

Freed from the attacks of the Iroquois, Canada, at 
the beginning of the eighteenth century, entered upon 
a period of comparative prosperity, and during the 
first half of the century she continued to be a thorn 
in the side of New England. Before the final con- 
flict began, France and England were at war from 
1702 to 1 71 3, and again from 1741 to 1748, a total of 
eighteen years, and during most of these years the 
New England frontier was exposed to savage inroads. 
There was an atrocious massacre at Deerfield in 1704, 
and another at Haverhill in 1708, and at all times there 
was terror on the frontier. Even in time of peace the 
Indians did not wholly cease from their incursions, 
and there is little doubt that their turbulence was 
secretly fomented by the Canadian government. In 
1745 the indignant New Englanders tasted for a 
moment the sweets of legitimate revenge. The 
strongest and most important fortress of the French 
in America, next to Quebec, was Louisburg, on Cape 
Breton Island, which commanded the fisheries and the 
approaches to the St. Lawrence. At the instance of 
Governor Shirley, three thousand volunteers were 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 105 

raised by Massachusetts, three hundred by New 
Hampshire, three hundred by Rhode Island, and five 
hundred by Connecticut. The whole force was com- 
manded by William Pepperell, a merchant of Maine. 
With the assistance of four English ships of the line, 
they laid siege to Louisburg on May-day, 1745, and 
pressed the matter so vigorously that on the 1 7th of 
June — just thirty years before the battle of Bunker 
Hill — the French commander was browbeaten into 
surrendering his almost impregnable fortress. The 
gilded iron cross over the new entrance to Harvard 
College Library is a trophy of this memorable exploit, 
which not only astonished the world, but saved 
New England from a contemplated French invasion. 
Greatly to the chagrin of the American colonies, the 
treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle restored Louisburg to the 
French, in exchange for Madras, in Hindustan, which 
France had taken from England. The men of New 
England felt that their services were held cheap, and 
were much irritated at the preference accorded by the 
British government to its general imperial interests at 
the expense of its American colonies. 

A great war had now become inevitable. By the 
treaty of Utrecht, in 171 3, Acadia had been ceded to 
England, but neither this treaty nor that of Aix-la- 
Chapelle, in 1748, defined the boundary between 
Acadia and Maine, nor did either treaty do anything 
toward settling the eastern limits of Louisiana. The 
Penobscot Valley furnished one ever burning ques- 
tion, and the . New York frontier another. The dis- 
pute over the Ohio Valley was the fiercest of all, and 
from this quarter at last arose the conflagration which 
swept away all the hopes of French colonial empire in 



I06 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

two hemispheres. In 1 750, the Ohio Company, formed 
for the purpose of colonizing the valley, had surveyed 
the country as far as the present site of Louisville. 
In 1753 the French, taking the alarm, crossed Lake 
Erie and began to fortify themselves at Presque Isle 
and at Venango on the Allegheny River. This 
aroused the ire of Virginia, and George Washington 

— a venturous and hardy youth of twenty-one, but 
gifted with a sagacity beyond his years — was sent 
by Governor Dinwiddie to Venango to order off the 
trespassers. Washington got scanty comfort from 
this mission ; but the next spring both French and 
English tried to forestall each other in fortifying the 
all-important place where the Allegheny and Monon- 
gahela rivers join to form the Ohio, the place where 
the city of Pittsburg now stands. In the course of 
these preliminary manceuvres, Washington fought his 
first battle at Great Meadows, — though as yet war 
had not been declared between France and England, 

— and being attacked by an overwhelmingly superior 
force, was obliged to surrender, with the whole of his 
little army. So the French got possession of the much- 
coveted situation, and erected there Fort Duquesne as 
a menace to all future English intruders. In 1755 the 
English accepted the challenge, and it was in attempt- 
ing to reach Fort Duquesne that the unwary Brad- 
dock was slain, and his army so wofully defeated by 
swarms of Ottawas, Hurons, and Dela wares, which the 
Frenchmen's forest diplomacy had skilfully gathered 
together. 

The defeat of Braddock is memorable on many 
accounts, but chiefly for the way in which it inured 
to the credit of the youthful Washington, while it dis- 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 107 

pelled the glamour of invincibleness which had hitherto 
hung about the trained soldiery of Britain. When 
Braddock was appointed commander-in-chief of the 
forces which were to ward off French aoro-ression in 
the Ohio Valley, he set about his task in high spirits. 
He told Benjamin Franklin that Fort Duquesne could 
hardly detain him more than three or four days, and 
then he would be ready to march across country to 
Niagara, and thence to Fort Frontenac. And when 
the sagacious Franklin reminded him that the Indians 
were adepts in the art of laying ambuscades, he scorn- 
fully answered, " The savages may be formidable to 
your raw American militia; upon the king's regulars 
and disciplined troops it is impossible that they should 
make any impression." In this too confident mood 
the expedition started. There were more than two 
thousand men in all, — British regulars, and colonial 
militia from Virginia and New York. Washington 
was there as aid to General Braddock, and along with 
him, arrayed under one banner, were Horatio Gates 
and Thomas Gage. In every way Braddock made 
light of his American allies, calling in question, not 
only their bravery and skill, but even their common 
honesty, and behaving in all respects as disagreeably 
as he could. Their road was difficult in the extreme. 
At its best it was a bridle-path no more than ten feet 
wide, and desperately encumbered with underbrush 
and fallen tree-trunks. Through the dense forest and 
over the rugged mountains they thus made their way 
in a straggling line nearly four miles long, exposed at 
every moment to sudden overthrow by a flank attack ; 
and so slow was their progress that it took them five 
weeks to accomplish one hundred and thirty miles. 



Io8 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

Wearied and impatient of such delay, Braddock at last 
left his heavy guns and wagons, and pushed on with 
twelve hundred picked men till he was within ten 
miles of Fort Duquesne. Suddenly the dense woods 
were ablaze on every side with the fire of rifles wielded 
by an invisible foe. The ambuscade had been most 
skilfully prepared by Charles de Langlade, a redoubt- 
able coureur de dots. It was in vain that a few cannon 
were tardily hauled upon the scene. The regulars 
were overcome with panic and thrown into hopeless 
disorder, while the merciless fire cut down scores 
every minute. Out of eighty officers, sixty were soon 
disabled. Braddock, after having five horses shot 
under him, fell, mortally wounded. The Virginia 
troops alone kept in order under the terrible fire, and 
Washington, putting himself at their head, covered 
the flight of the British remnant and saved it from 
utter destruction. Of the twelve hundred picked men, 
more than seven hundred were slain ; all the artillery 
and baggage wagons were lost ; the frontiers of Vir- 
ginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania were uncovered, 
and the dreadful story of Indian massacre soon began 
in the outlying villages. In this fierce woodland fight 
the loss of the ambushed Frenchmen and Indians had 
not exceeded sixty men. The fame of the British 
overthrow went far and wide throughout North Amer- 
ica. Its immediate consequences were soon repaired, 
but the lesson which it taught was not soon forgotten. 
As the unfortunate Braddock had himself invited the 
comparison, men were not slow in contrasting the in- 
efficiency of the British officers and troops with the 
stanchness of the Virginians and the skill of their 
young commander. And in later years, when in town 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 109 

meetings and at tavern firesides men discussed the 
feasibleness of resisting George III., the incidents of 
Braddock's defeat did not fail to point a suggestive 
moral. 

The war thus inauspiciously begun was not confined 
to American soil. After three-quarters of a century 
of vague skirmishing, England was now prepared to 
measure her strength with France in a decisive strug- 
gle for colonial empire and for the lordship of the sea. 
The whole world was convulsed with the struggle of 
the Seven Years' War — a war more momentous in 
its consequences than any that had ever yet been car- 
ried on between rival European powers ; a war made 
illustrious by the genius of one of the greatest generals, 
and of perhaps the very greatest war minister, the 
world has ever seen. It was an evil hour for French 
hopes of colonial empire when the invincible prowess 
of Frederick the Great was allied with the far-sighted 
policy of William Pitt. In the autumn of 1757, shortly 
after the Great Commoner was intrusted with the 
direction of the foreign affairs of England, the king 
of Prussia annihilated the French army at Rossbach, 
and thus — to say nothing of the immediate results — 
prepared the way for Waterloo and Sedan, and for the 
creation of a united and independent Germany. Yet, 
in spite of this overwhelming victory, the united 
strength of France and Austria and Russia would at 
last have proved too much for the warlike king, had 
not England thrown sword and purse into the scale 
in his favour. By his firm and energetic support of 
Prussia, Pitt kept the main strength of France busily 
occupied in Europe, while English fleets attacked her 
on the ocean, and English armies overran her posses- 



no THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

sions in America, and wrested from her grasp the con- 
trol of India, which she was also seeking to acquire. 

At the time of Pitt's accession to power, affairs were 
not going on prosperously in America. The crush- 
ing defeat of Braddock had, indeed, been followed by 
the victory of Johnson over Dieskau at Lake George, 
But this victory did more harm than good ; for John- 
son remained inactive after it, and Dieskau, having 
been taken prisoner, was succeeded by the famous 
Marquis of Montcalm, a general of great ability, who 
resumed offensive operations with vigour and success. 
In 1756 Montcalm destroyed Oswego; in 1757 he 
captured Fort William Henry, which Johnson had 
built to defend the northern approaches to the Hud- 
son; and in 1758 he defeated the English with heavy 
loss in the desperate battle of Ticonderoga. 

This signal defeat of the English possesses some 
interest as one among many illustrations of the diffi- 
culty of carrying by storm a strongly intrenched posi- 
tion. In July, 1 758, General Abercrombie, at the head 
of fifteen thousand men, the largest army that had ever 
been assembled in America, crossed Lake George, and 
advanced upon the strong position which barred the 
approach to Canada from the valley of the Hudson. 
In a preliminary skirmish was slain Lord Howe, elder 
brother of the admiral and the general of the War of 
Independence, an able and gallant officer, who had so 
endeared himself to the Americans that Massachusetts 
afterward raised a monument to his memory in West- 
minster Abbey. The force with which Montcalm held 
Ticonderoga numbered little more than three thousand, 
and as it was thought that reenforcements were on their 
way to him, Abercrombie decided to hazard a direct as- 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE III 

sault. The result was a useless slaughter, like that which 
the present generation has witnessed at Fredericks- 
burg and Cold Harbor, After an obstinate struggle of 
four hours, in which the gallant Englishmen dashed 
themselves repeatedly against a stout breastwork nine 
feet high, they lost heart and withdrew in disorder, 
leaving two thousand men killed or wounded on the 
field. For this disastrous error of judgment Aber- 
crombie was superseded by General Amherst. 

The victory of Ticonderoga was, however, the last 
considerable success of the French arms in this war. 
The stars in their courses had begun to fight against 
them, and, with the exception of this brief gleam of 
triumph, their career for the next two years was an 
unbroken succession of disasters. In 1758 the French 
fleets were totally defeated by Admiral Osborne off 
Cartagena, and by Admiral Pococke in the Indian 
Ocean, while their great squadron destined for North 
America was driven ashore in the Bay of Biscay by 
Sir Edward Hawke. In Germany, their army was 
defeated by the Prince of Brunswick, at Crefeld, in 
June. 

In America prodigious exertions were made. Mas- 
sachusetts raised 7000 men, and during the year con- 
tributed more than a million dollars toward the 
expenses of the war. Connecticut raised 5000 troops ; 
New Hampshire and Rhode Island furnished 1000 be- 
tween them ; New York raised 2680 ; New Jersey, 
1000; Pennsylvania, 2700; Virginia, 2000, and South 
Carolina, 1250. With these provincial troops, with 
22,000 British regulars, and with an especial levy of 
Highlanders from Scotland, there were in all 50,000 
troops collected for the overthrow of the French power 



112 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

in America. With such vigorous preparations as 
these, events proceeded rapidly. In July, General 
Amherst captured Louisburg, and finally relieved New 
England from its standing menace, besides securing 
the mouth of the St. Lawrence. In August, General 
Bradstreet, by the destruction of Fort Frontenac, broke 
the communication between Canada and the French 
settlements in the West. In November, General 
Forbes, having built a road over the Alleghanies and 
being assisted by Washington and Henry Bouquet, 
succeeded in capturing Fort Duquesne, which then 
became Fort Pitt, and now as Pittsburg still bears 
the name of the great war minister. 

The capture of this important post gave the English 
the control of the Ohio Valley, and thus secured the 
object for which the war had been originally under- 
taken. Great were the rejoicings in Pennsylvania and 
Virginia, and great was the honour accorded to Wash- 
ington, to whose skill the capture of the " gateway of 
the West " had been chiefly due. But Pitt had now 
made up his mind to drive the French from America 
altogether, and what had been done was only the prel- 
ude to heavier blows. Terrible was the catalosrue of 
French defeats. In 1759 their army in Germany was 
routed at Minden by the Prince of Brunswick; one 
great fleet was defeated at Lagos Bay by Admiral 
Boscawen, and another was annihilated at Quiberon 
by Sir Edward Hawke ; Havre was bombarded by 
Admiral Rodney ; Guadeloupe, the most valuable of 
the French West Indies, was taken ; and serious re- 
verses were experienced in India. In America, Niag- 
ara was taken on the 24th of July, Ticonderoga on the 
27th, and Crown Point on the ist of August. And 



THE FALL OF NEW FR.\NCE 1 13 

the 13th of September witnessed the last great scene 
in this eventful story. 

Crestfallen with calamity, the people of Canada had 
begun to cry for peace at any price ; but Montcalm, 
ensconced with seven thousand men in the impregna- 
ble stronghold of Quebec, declared that, though the 
outlook was anything but cheering, he had not lost 
courage, but was resolved to find his grave under the 
ruins of the colony. Quebec was the objective point 
of the summer campaign, and early in June the youth- 
ful General Wolfe had appeared in the St. Lawrence 
with an army of eight thousand men, supported by a 
powerful fleet of twenty-two ships of the line, with as 
many frigates. In this memorable expedition Colonel 
Barre, afterward the eloquent friend of the American 
colonies in Parliament, was adjutant-general ; a regi- 
ment of light infantry was commanded by William 
Howe ; and one of the ships had for its captain the 
immortal navigator, James Cook. It was intended 
that Johnson, after taking Niagara, and Amherst, after 
taking Ticonderoga and Crown Point, should unite 
their forces with those of Wolfe, and overwhelm the 
formidable Montcalm by sheer weight of numbers. 
But Johnson failed for want of ships to transport his 
men, and Amherst failed through dulness of mind, so 
that Wolfe was left to do the work alone. The task 
was well-nigh impossible, though the powerful English 
fleet had full control of the river. Standing on a lofty 
rock just above the junction of the St. Charles and St. 
Lawrence rivers, and guarded by water on three sides, 
Quebec was open to a land attack only on the north- 
west side, where the precipice was so steep as to be 
deemed inaccessible. After wasting the summer In 



114 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 



abortive attacks and fruitless efforts to take the wary 
Montcalm at a disadvantage, Wolfe suddenly made up 
his mind to perform the impossible, and lead his army 
up the dangerous precipice. A decided movement of 
the fleet drew Montcalm's attention far up the river, 
while at one o'clock in the morning of the 13th of 
September five thousand Englishmen in boats, without 
touching an oar, glided steadily down-stream with the 
current, and landed just under the steep bluff. Maple 
and ash trees grew on the side, and pulling themselves 
up by branches and bare gnarled roots from tree to 
tree, with herculean toil the light infantry gained the 
summit and overpowered the small picket stationed 
there, while the heavy-armed troops made their way 
up a rough winding path near by. By daybreak the 
ascent was accomplished, and the English army stood 
in solid array on the Heights of Abraham, with the 
doomed city before them. When the news was 
conveyed to Montcalm, in his camp the other side 
of the St. Charles, he thought at first that it must be a 
feint to draw him from his position ; but when he had 
so far recovered from his astonishment as to compre- 
hend what had happened, he saw that his only hope 
lay in crushing the intruders before noon, and without 
a moment's delay he broke camp and marched for the 
enemy. At ten o'clock the two armies stood face to 
face, equal in numbers, but very unequal in quality. 
The five thousand Englishmen were all thoroughly 
disciplined soldiers, while of Montcalm's force but two 
thousand were French regulars, the rest being unsteady 
Canadian militia. France was kept altogether too 
busy in Europe to be able to spare many trained sol- 
diers to defend her tottering ecnpire in America. 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE II5 

After an hour of weak cannonading the French 
army charged upon the EngHshmen, who stood as 
firm as a stone wall and with a swift and steady 
musket fire soon made the French recoil. As soon 
as the French attack wavered, the English in turn 
promptly charged, and the enemy were routed. In 
this supreme moment the two heroic commanders 
were borne from the field with mortal wounds, and 
as life ebbed quickly away each said his brief and 
touching word which history will never forget. 
*' Now, God be praised, I will die in peace," said 
Wolfe ; " Thank God, I shall not live to see Quebec 
surrendered," said the faithful Frenchman. These 
noble deaths, and the wild hardihood of the feat that 
had just been accomplished, mark well the battle which 
completed the ruin of the colonial empire of Catholic 
and despotic France. There have been many greater 
generals than Wolfe, as there have been many greater 
battles than the battle of Quebec. But just as the 
adventurous boldness of that morning's exploit stands 
unsurpassed in history, so in its far-reaching historic 
significance the victory of Wolfe stands foremost among 
modern events. As the boats were gliding quietly down 
the river in the darkness, while the great events of the 
next ten hours were still in the unknown future, the 
young general repeated to his friends standing about 
him the exquisite verses of Gray's " Elegy written in a 
Country Churchyard," which had been published only 
ten years before, and declared that he would rather 
have written that poem than take Quebec. Could he 
have foreseen all that his victory would mean to future 
ages, and what a landmark it would forever remain in 
the history of mankind, he might perhaps have modi- 



Il6 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

fied this generous judgment. The battle of Quebec 
did not make the supremacy of the EngHsh race in the 
world ; but as marking the moment at which that 
supremacy first became clearly manifest, it deserves 
even more than the meed of fame which history has 
assigned to it. 

During the progress of this eventful war, the tribes 
of the Long House, under the influence of Sir William 
Johnson, had either remained neutral, or had occasion- 
ally assisted the English cause. The Algonquin tribes, 
however, from east to west — including even the Dela- 
wares, who, since the decline of the Iroquois power, no 
longer consented to call themselves women — made 
common cause with the French, and in many cases 
proved very formidable allies. The overthrow of the 
French power came as a terrible shock to these Indians, 
who now found themselves quite unprotected from 
English encroachment. At first they refused to 
believe that the catastrophe was irretrievable, and one 
great Indian conceived a plan for retrieving it. 

Of all the Indians of whom we have any record, 
there were few more remarkable for intellectual power 
than Pontiac, chief of the Ottawas. He was as fierce 
and treacherous as any of his race, but he was char- 
acterized by an intellectual curiosity very rare among 
barbarians, and he exhibited an amount of forethought 
truly wonderful in an Indian. It seemed to him that 
if all the tribes in the countr}^ could be brought 
to unite in one grand attack upon the English, they 
might perhaps succeed in overthrowing them. It was 
a scheme like that which perhaps on insufficient grounds 
has been ascribed to the Wampanoag Philip, but the 
war set on foot by Pontiac was of far greater dimen- 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE I17 

sions than " King Philip's War," though the suffering 
and terror it inflicted were confined to what then 
seemed a distant frontier. The time had gone by 
when the English colonies could suppose, even in a 
momentary fit of wild despondency, that their exist- 
ence was seriously threatened. The scene of Pontiac's 
war, compared with Philip's, marks the progress of the 
white men, and shows how far the exposed frontier 
had been thrown westward. After the conquest of 
Canada the Indian disappears forever from the history 
of New England, and except in the remote forests of 
northern Maine hardly a vestige of his presence has 
been left there. The tribes which Pontiac aroused to 
bloodshed were the Algonquin tribes of the Upper 
Lakes, and of the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, with 
some of the Mobilians and the remnant of the Hurons ; 
and out of the Iroquois league his crafty eloquence pre- 
vailed upon the most numerous tribe, the Senecas, who 
were less completely under English influence than their 
brethren east of the Genesee. 

The peace of 1763 between France and England had 
been signed but three short months when this new war 
unexpectedly broke out. Two years of savage butchery 
ensued, in the course of which nearly all the forest 
garrisons in the West were overcome and massa- 
cred, though the stronger places, such as Detroit 
and Fort Pitt, succeeded with some difliculty in 
holding out. The wild frontier of Pennsylvania 
became the scene of atrocities which beggar de- 
scription. Night after night the forest clearings 
were made hideous with the glare of blazing log 
cabins and the screams of murdered women and 
children. The traveller through the depths of the 



Il8 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

woods was frequently appalled by the sight of the 
scorched and blackened corpses of men and women 
tightly bound to tree-trunks, where their lives had 
gone out amid diabolical torments. During the sum- 
mer and autumn of 1763 more than two thousand per- 
sons were murdered or carried into captivity, while the 
more sheltered towns and villages to the eastward 
were crowded with starving refugees who had escaped 
the firebrand and the tomahawk. 

One fiendish incident of that bad time especially 
called forth the horror and rage of the people. A man, 
passing by a little schoolhouse rudely built of logs 
and standing on a lonely road, but many miles inside 
the frontier, "was struck by the unwonted silence; 
and, pushing open the door, he looked in. In the 
centre lay the master, scalped and lifeless, with a 
Bible clasped in his hand ; while around the room 
were strewn the bodies of his pupils, nine in number, 
miserably mangled, though one of them still retained 
a spark of life." Maddened by such dreadful deeds, 
and unable to obtain from the government at Phila- 
delphia a force adequate for the protection of their 
homes, the men of the frontier organized themselves 
into armed bands, and soon began to make reprisals 
that were both silly and cruel, inasmuch as they fell 
upon the wrong persons. The principal headquarters 
of these frontier companies was at Paxton, a small 
town on the east bank of the Susquehanna ; and their 
first memorable exploit was the sack of Conestoga, a 
village of friendly Indians of Iroquois lineage, who had 
some time since undergone a transformation from scalp- 
hunting savages into half-civilized vagabonds, and had 
in no way molested the English settlers. This out- 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE II9 

rage called forth a proclamation from the governor, 
condemning the act and offering a reward for the ap- 
prehension of the persons concerned in it, while the 
survivors of the Conestoga massacre were hurried to 
Lancaster, and lodged in the jail there to get them 
out of harm's way. The Paxton men, greatly incensed 
at what they considered the hostile action of the 
Quaker government, and determined not to be balked 
of their prey, galloped into Lancaster, broke into the 
jail, and murdered all the Indians who were sheltered 
there. In the rural districts these deeds were gener- 
ally excused as the acts of men goaded to desperation 
by unutterable wrongs ; but in the cultivated Quaker 
society of Philadelphia they were regarded with horror, 
and contentions arose which were embittered by theo- 
logical prejudice, since the Paxton men were mostly 
Presbyterians of Scotch-Irish ancestry, and boldly justi- 
fied their conduct by texts from the Old Testament. 
As the excitement increased, the Paxton men, to the 
number of a thousand, marched on Philadelphia, with 
intent to overawe the government and to wreak their 
vengeance on an innocent party of Christian Indians 
who were quartered on an island a little below the 
city. There was great alarm in the city, but when the 
rioters arrived at Germantown, they saw that to cap- 
ture Philadelphia would far exceed their powers ; and 
they listened to the wise counsel of Franklin, who ad- 
vised them to go home and guard the troubled frontier, 
a task for which none were better fitted than they. 
The danger of civil strife beinor thus averted, the fiame 
of controversy burned itself out in a harmless pamphlet 
war, in which Quakers and Presbyterians heaped argu- 
ment and ridicule upon each other to their heart's 



I20 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

content Meanwhile, at Bushy Run, in the Alleghanies, 
Henry Bouquet won the fiercest battle ever fought 
between white men and Indians ; and in the course 
of the next year he made his way far into the Ohio 
country, and completely humbled the Shawnees and 
Delawares, so that they were fain to sue for peace. 
This campaign wrought the ruin of the great Indian 
conspiracy. The Senecas were browbeaten by John- 
son, the French refused to lend any assistance, and 
finally Pontiac, after giving in his submission, was 
murdered in the woods at Cahokia, near St. Louis. 
Useless butchery was all that ever came of his deep- 
laid scheme, as it is all that has ever come of most 
Indian schemes ; but the " Conspiracy of Pontiac " is 
worth remembering as a natural sequel of the great 
French war, as the most serious attempt ever made by 
the Indians to assert themselves against white men, and 
as the theme of one of the most brilliant and fascinat- 
ing books that has ever been written by any historian 
since the days of Herodotus. 

The Seven Years' War did not come to an end 
until Spain, afraid for her possessions in the East and 
West Indies, had taken up arms on the side of France. 
She thus invited the catastrophe which she dreaded, 
for in 1762 England conquered Cuba and the Philip- 
pine Islands. At the definitive treaty of peace, known 
as the peace of Paris, and signed in February, 1763, 
England gave back Cuba and the Philippine Islands 
to Spain in exchange for Florida. To indemnify 
Spain for this loss of Florida, incurred through her 
alliance with France, the latter power ceded to Spain 
the town of New Orleans and all of Louisiana west 
of the Mississippi — a vast and ill-defined region, as 



THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 12 1 

thoroughly unknown at that day as Australia or Cen- 
tral Africa. From 1763 until 1803 New Orleans and 
St. Louis were accordingly governed by Spaniards. 
In 1803 this vast region was ceded by Spain to Bona- 
parte, who sold it to the United States for fifteen 
million dollars. Florida, on the other hand, was re- 
turned to Spain by England at the close of the Revo- 
lutionary War, and was afterward, in 1819, bought 
from Spain by the United States. 

All of Louisiana east of the Mississippi except New 
Orleans, and all of Canada, were at the peace of Paris 
surrendered to England, so that not a rood of land in 
all North America remained to France. France also 
renounced all claim upon India, and it went without 
saying that England, and not France, was now to be 
mistress of the sea. 

It may be said of the treaty of Paris that no other 
treaty ever transferred such an immense portion of the 
earth's surface from one nation to another. But such 
a statement, after all, gives no adequate idea of the 
enormous results which the genius of English liberty 
had for ages been preparing, and which had now 
found definite expression in the policy of William Pitt. 
The loth of February, 1763, might not unfitly be cele- 
brated as the proudest day in the history of England. 
For on that day it was made clear — had any one had 
eyes to discern the future, and read between the lines 
of this portentous treaty — that she was destined to 
become the revered mother of many free and enlight- 
ened nations, all speaking the matchless language 
which the English Bible has forever consecrated, and 
earnest in carrying out the sacred ideas for w^iich 
Latimer suffered and Hampden fought. It was pro- 



122 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 

claimed on that day that the institutions of the Roman 
Empire, however useful in their time, were at last out- 
grown and superseded, and that the guidance of the 
world was henceforth to be, not in the hands of imperial 
bureaus or papal conclaves, but in the hands of the 
representatives of honest labour and the preachers of 
righteousness, unhampered by ritual or dogma. The 
independence of the United States was the first great 
lesson which was drawn from this solemn proclama- 
tion. Our own history is to-day the first extended 
commentary which is gradually unfolding to men's 
minds the latent significance of the compact by which 
the vanquished Old Regime of France renounced its 
pretensions to guide the world. In days to come, the 
lesson will be taken up and reiterated by other great 
communities planted by England, in Africa, in Aus- 
tralia, and the islands of the Pacific, until barbarous 
sacerdotalism and despotic privilege shall have van- 
ished from the face of the earth, and the principles of 
Protestantism, rightly understood, and of English self- 
government, shall have become forever the undisputed 
possession of all mankind. 



IV 



CONNECTICUT'S INFLUENCE ON THE 
FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 



IV 



CONNECTICUT'S INFLUENCE ON THE 
FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 

Connecticut's influence on the first beginnings 
and final establishment of our Federal government 
has attracted little attention; and this is but one 
among many instances of the fact that a really intel- 
ligent and fruitful study of American history is only 
an affair of yesterday. 

It is surprising to think how little attention was 
paid to the subject half a century ago. I believe that, 
as schoolboys, we did learn something about some of 
the battles in the War of Independence, and two or 
three of the sea-fights of the years 1812-1815; but our 
knowledge of earlier times was limited to dim notions 
about Captain John Smith and the Pilgrim Fathers, 
while now and then perhaps there flitted across our 
minds the figures of Putnam and the wolf or a 
witch or two swinging from the gallows in Salem 
village, or the painted Indians rushing with wild 
war-whoop into Schenectady. Small pains were taken 
to teach us the significance of things that had hap- 
pened at our very doors. I was myself a native of 
Hartford, yet long after Plymouth Rock had come 
to mean something to me, the names of Thomas 
Hooker and Samuel Stone fell upon my ears as mere 
empty sound. Much as we were given to bragging, 
in Fourth of July speeches, on our fine and mighty 

125 



126 CONNECTICUT'S INFLUENCE 

qualities, we were modestly unconscious of the fact 
that some of our early worthies were personages as 
interesting and memorable as their brethren who 
fought the Lord's battles under Cromwell. In those 
days when our great historian, Francis Parkman, pub- 
lished his first work, the fascinating book which de- 
scribed the conspiracy of Pontiac, the greater part of 
the first edition lay for years untouched on the pub- 
lishers' shelves, and one of the author's friends said to 
him : " Parkman, why don't you take some European 
subject, — something that people will be interested 
in ? Why don't you write about the times of Michael 
Angelo, or the Wars of the Roses, or the age of 
Louis XIV.? Nobody cares to read about what hap- 
pened out here in the woods a hundred years ago." 
Parkman's reply was like Luther's on a greater occa- 
sion, " I do what I do because I cannot do other- 
wise." That was, of course, the answer of the inspired 
man marked out by destiny for a needed work. 

An incident which occurred in my own experience 
more than twenty years ago has not yet lost for me its 
ludicrous flavour. A gentleman in a small New 
England town was asked if some lectures of mine on 
" America's Place in History " would be likely to find 
a good audience there. He reflected for a moment, 
then shook his head gravely. " The subject," said he, 
" is one which would interest very few people." In the 
state of mind thus indicated there is something so bewil- 
dering that I believe I have not yet recovered from it. 

During the past twenty years, however, the interest 
in American history has been at once increasing and 
growing enlightened. Every year finds a greater 
number of people directing their attention to the 



ON THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 127 

subject, and directing it in a more intelligent way. 
Twenty years ago the Johns Hopkins University set 
the example of publishing a monthly series of pam- 
phlets setting forth the results of special research upon 
topics that had either escaped attention or been very 
inadequately treated. One paper would discuss the 
functions of constables in New England in the early 
days ; another would inquire into the causes of the piracy 
that infested our coasts at the end of the seventeenth 
century ; another would make the history of town and 
county government in Illinois as absorbing as a novel ; 
another would treat of old Maryland manors, another 
of the influence of Quakers upon antislavery senti- 
ment in North Carolina, and so on. Many of the 
writers of these papers, trained in the best methods of 
historical study, have become professors of history in 
our colleges from one end of the Union to the other, 
and are sowing good seed where they go ; while other 
colleges have begun to follow the example thus set. 
From Harvard and Columbia and the Universities of 
Wisconsin and Nebraska come especially notable con- 
tributions to our study each year. In Kentucky a 
Filson Club investigates the early overflow of our pop- 
ulation across the Alleghanies ; in Milwaukee a Park- 
man Club discusses questions raised by the books of 
that great writer, while books long forgotten or never 
before printed are now made generally accessible. 
Thus the Putnams of New York are bringing out ably 
edited sets of the writings of the men who founded 
this republic. Thus Dr. Coues has clothed with fresh 
life the journals and letters of the great explorers who 
opened up our Pacific country ; while a crowning 
achievement has been the publication in Cleveland, 



128 CONNECTICUT'S INFLUENCE 

Ohio, of the seventy-three volumes of Jesuit Relations 
written during two centuries by missionaries in North 
America to their superiors in France or Italy. Such 
things speak eloquently of the change that has come 
over us. They show that while we can still draw les- 
sons from the Roman Forum and the Frankish Field- 
of-March, we have awakened to the fact that the New 
England town-meeting also has its historic lessons. 

Now when we come to the early history of Connecti- 
cut and consider the circumstances under which it was 
founded, we are soon impressed with the unusual sig- 
nificance and importance of every step in the story. 
We are soon brought to see that the secession of the 
three river towns from Massachusetts was an event no 
less memorable than the voyage of the Mayflower or 
the arrival of Winthrop's great colony in Massachu- 
setts Bay. In order to appreciate its significance, we 
may begin by pointing out one very marked and no- 
ticeable peculiarity of the early arrangement and dis- 
tribution of population in New England. It formed 
a great contrast to what occurred in Virginia. The 
decisive circumstance which insured the success of the 
Virginia colony after its early period of distress some- 
times reaching despair, was the growing European 
demand for tobacco. The commercial basis of Old 
Virginia's existence was the exportation of tobacco 
raised upon large estates along the bank of the James 
and neighbouring rivers. Now we find that colony 
growing steadily inland in a compact mass presenting 
a united front against the wilderness and its denizens. 
We do not find a few settlements on James River, a few 
on the Rappahannock, and another group perhaps at 
Lynchburg, quite out of military supporting distance 



ON THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 



129 



of each other ; in other words, we do not find a group 
of distinct communities, but we find one little state, 
the further development of which might make a great 
state, as it did, but could never make a federation of 
states. If we look at such a colony as Pennsylvania, 
where Church and State were from the outset com- 
pletely separated, quite as much as in Rhode Island, 
we find a similar compactness of growth ; we find the 
colony presenting to the wilderness a solid front. If 
we next consider New Netherland, we notice a slight 
difference. There we find a compact colony with its 
centre on Manhattan Island, and far up the river an- 
other settlement at Albany quite beyond easy support- 
ing distance and apparently exposed to all the perils of 
the wilderness. But this settlement of Albany is read- 
ily explained, for there was the powerful incentive of 
the rich fur trade, while the perils of the wilderness 
were in great measure eliminated by the firm alliance 
between Dutchmen and Mohawks. 

Now when we come to the settlement of New Eng- 
land, we find things going very differently. Had the 
Puritan settlers behaved like most other colonists, their 
little state, beginning on the shores of Massachusetts 
Bay, would have grown steadily and compactly west- 
ward, pushing the Indians before it. First, it would 
have brushed away the Wampanoags and Naticks ; 
then the Narragansetts and Nipmucks would have 
succumbed to them, and in due course of time they 
would have reached the country of the Pequots and 
Mohegans. That would have been like the growth of 
Virginia. It would have been a colonial growth of the 
ordinary type and it would have resulted in a single 
New England state, not in a group bearing that name. 



I30 CONNECTICUT'S INFLUENCE 

Very different from this was the actual course of 
events. Instead of this sohd growth, we find within 
the first ten years after Winthrop's arrival in Massa- 
chusetts Bay that while his colony was still in the 
weakness of infancy, even while its chief poverty, as 
John Cotton said, was poverty in men, the new 
arrivals instead of reinforcing it, marched off into the 
wilderness, heedless of danger, and formed new colo- 
nies for themselves. This phenomenon is so singular 
as to demand explanation, and the explanation is not 
far to seek. We shall find it in the guiding purpose 
which led the Puritans of that day to cross the ocean 
in quest of new homes. 

What was that guiding purpose ? This is a subject 
upon which cheap moralizing has abounded. We have 
been told that the Puritans came to New England in 
search of religious liberty, and that with reprehensible 
want of consistency, they proceeded to trample upon 
religious liberty as ruthlessly as any of the churches 
that had been left behind in the old world. We often 
hear it said that Mrs. Hemans laboured under a fond 
delusion when she wrote 

" They have left unstained what there they found, 
Freedom to worship God." 

By no means ! cry the modern critics of the Puritans ; 
their record in respect of religious freedom was as far 
as possible from stainless. From much of the modern 
writing on this well-worn theme one would almost sup- 
pose that religious bigotry had never existed in the 
world until the settlement of New England ; one would 
almost be led to fancy that racks and thumb-screws 
and the stake had never been heard of. 



ON THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 131 

Now the difficulty with this sort of historic criticism 
is that it deals too much in vague generalities and 
quite overlooks the fact that there were Puritans and 
Puritans, that the God-fearing men of that stripe were 
not all cast in the same mould, like Professor Clerk 
Maxwell's atoms. I have more than once heard people 
allude to the restriction of the suffrage to church mem- 
bers in the early days of Massachusetts and Connecti- 
cut, which is very much as if one were to make state- 
ments about the despotic government of Czar Nicholas 
and Queen Victoria. Still more frequently do people 
confound the men of Plymouth with the very different 
company that founded Boston. As to Mrs. Hemans, 
her remark was not so very far from the truth if 
restricted to the colony of the Pilgrims, about which 
she was writing. On the whole, the purpose of that 
little band of Pilgrims was to secure freedom to wor- 
ship after their own fashion, and similar freedom they 
were measurably ready to accord to those who came 
among them. They had witnessed in Holland the 
good effects of religious liberty, and their attitude of 
mind was largely determined by the strong personal 
qualities of such men as John Robinson, William 
Bradford, and Edward Winslow, who were all noted for 
breadth, gentleness, and tact. The record of Plymouth 
is not quite unstained by persecution, but it is an emi- 
nently good one for the seventeenth century ; the cases 
are few and by no means flagrant. 

With the colony of Massachusetts Bay the circum- 
stances were entirely different. That colony was at 
the outset a commercial company, like the great com- 
pany which founded Virginia and afterward had such 
an interesting struggle with James I., ending in the loss 



132 CONNECTICUT'S INFLUENCE 

of the Virginia Company's charter and its destruction 
as a political body. This fate served as a warning five 
years later to the Massachusetts Bay Company. In- 
stead of staying in London where hostile courts and 
the means of enforcing their hostile decrees were too 
near at hand, they decided to carry their charter across 
the ocean and carry out their cherished purposes as 
far removed as possible from interference. Their 
commercial aims were but a cloak to cover the pur- 
pose they had most at heart, — a purpose which could 
not be avowed by any party of men seeking for a royal 
charter. Their purpose was to found a theocratic 
commonwealth, like that of the children of Israel in 
the good old days before their froward hearts con- 
ceived the desire for a king. There was no thought 
of throwing off allegiance to the British crown ; but 
saving such allegiance, their purpose was to build up 
a theocratic society according to their own notions, 
and not for one moment did they propose to tolerate 
among them any persons whom they deemed unfit or 
unwilling to cooperate with them in their scheme. 
As for religious toleration, they scouted the very idea 
of the thing. There was no imputation which they 
resented more warmly than the imputation of treating 
heretics cordially, as they were treated in the Nether- 
lands. The writings of Massachusetts men in the seven- 
teenth century leave no possibility of doubt on this point. 
John Cotton was not a man of persecuting tempera- 
ment, but of religious liberty he had a very one-sided 
conception. According to Cotton, it is wrong for 
error to persecute truth, but it is the sacred duty of 
truth to persecute error. Which reminds one of the 
Hottentot chief's fine ethical distinction between right 



ON THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 



133 



and wrong : " Wrong is when somebody runs off with 
my wife; right is when I run off with some other 
fellow's wife." As for Nathaniel Ward, the "Simple 
Cobbler of Agawam," he tells us that there are people 
in the world who say, "that men ought to have liberty 
of their conscience, and that it is persecution to debar 
them of it." And what answer has the Simple Cobbler 
to make ? He is for the moment struck dumb. He 
declares, " I can rather stand amazed than reply to this ; 
it is an astonishment to think that the brains of men 
should be parboiled in such impious ignorance ; let all 
the wits under the heavens lay their heads together 
and find an assertion worse than this . . . and I will 
petition to be chosen the universal idiot of the world." 
The reverend gentleman who writes in this pungent 
style was the person who drew up the first code 
adopted in Massachusetts, the code which is known as 
its " Body of Liberties." One and all, these men who 
shaped the policy of Massachusetts would have echoed 
with approval the sentiment of the Scottish divine, 
Rutherford, who declared that toleration of all relieions 
is not far removed from blasphemy. Holding such 
opinions, they resented the imputation of tolerance in 
much the same spirit as that in which most members 
of the Republican party in the years just preceding 
our Civil War resented the imputation of being 
Abolitionists. 

While the founders of Massachusetts thus stoutly 
opposed religious liberty their opinions did not bear 
their worst fruits until after the middle of the century, 
when men of persecuting temperament like Norton 
and Endicott acquired control. In the earlier years 
the fiery zeal of such men as Wilson and Dudley was 



134 CONNECTICUT'S INFLUENCE 

tempered by the fine tact and moderation of Winthrop 
and Cotton. Winthrop's view of such matters was 
interesting and suggestive. In substance it was as 
follows: Here we are in the wilderness, a band of 
exiles who have given up all the comforts of our old 
homes, all the tender associations of the land we love 
best, in order to found a state according to a precon- 
ceived ideal in which most of us agree. We believe 
it to be important that the members of a Christian 
commonwealth should all hold the same opinions re- 
garding essentials, and of course it is for us to deter- 
mine what are essentials. If people who have come 
here with us hold different views, they have made a 
great mistake and had better go back to England. 
But if, holding different views, they still wish to remain 
in America, let them leave us in peace, and going 
elsewhere, found communities according to their con- 
ceptions of what is best. We do not wish to quarrel 
with them, but we will tell them plainly that they can- 
not stay here. Is there not, in this vast wilderness, 
enough elbow-room for many God-fearing communities? 
It was in accordance with this policy that when 
the first Congregational church was organized at 
Salem, two gentlemen who disapproved of the pro- 
ceedings were sent on board ship and carried back to 
England. And again, when profound offence had 
been taken at certain things said by Roger Williams 
and there was some talk of sending him to England, 
he was privately notified by Winthrop that if he would 
retire to some place beyond the Company's jurisdic- 
tion, such as Narragansett Bay, he need not fear 
molestation. This was virtually banishment, though 
not so sharp and harsh as that which was visited upon 



ON THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 135 

Mrs. Hutchinson and her friends after their conviction 
of heresy by a tribunal sitting in what is now Cam- 
bridge. Some of these heretics led by John Wheel- 
wright went northward to the Piscataqua country. 
At the mouth of that romantic stream the Episcopal 
followers of Mason and Gorges had lately founded the 
town of Portsmouth, and Wheelwright's people, in 
settling Exeter and Hampton, found these Episco- 
palians much pleasanter neighbours than they had left 
in Boston. As for Mrs. Hutchinson and her remain- 
ing friends, they found new homes upon Rhode Island. 
A few years later that eccentric agitator, Samuel 
Gorton, whom neither Plymouth nor even Providence 
nor Rhode Island could endure, bought land for him- 
self on the western shore of Narragansett Bay and 
made the beginnings of Warwick. 

From these examples we see that the principal cause 
of the scattering of New England settlers in communi- 
ties somewhat remote from each other was inability to 
agree on sundry questions pertaining to religion. It 
should be observed in passing that their differences of 
opinion seldom related to points of doctrine, but almost 
always to points of church government or religious 
discipline. For the most part they were questions on 
the borderland between theology and politics. Be- 
tween the settlements here mentioned the differences 
were strongly marked. While Winthrop's followers 
insisted upon the union of Church and State, those of 
Roger Williams insisted upon their complete separa- 
tion. The divergences of the New Hampshire people 
and those of the Newport colony had somewhat more 
of a doctrinal complexion, being implicated with sun- 
dry speculations as to salvation by grace and salvation 



136 CONNECTICUT'S INFLUENCE 

by works. These examples have prepared us to under- 
stand the case of Connecticut. The secession which 
gave rise to Connecticut was attended by no such 
stormy scenes as were witnessed at the banishment of 
Wheelwright and Mrs. Hutchinson, yet it included a 
greater number of elements of historic significance and 
was in many ways the most important and remarkable 
of the instances of segmentation which occurred in 
early New England. 

When the charter of the Massachusetts Company was 
brought to the western shore of the Atlantic, the mere 
fact of separation from England sufficed to transmute 
the commercial corporation into a self-governing re- 
public. The company had its governor, its deputy- 
governor, and its council of eighteen assistants, as 
was commonly the case with commercial joint-stock 
companies. In London this governing board would 
have exercised almost autocratic control over the 
transactions of the company, although politically it 
would have remained a body unknown to law, how- 
ever much influence it might have exerted. But on 
American soil the company at once became a political 
body, and its governor, deputy-governor, and assistants 
became the ruling head of a small republic consisting 
of the company's settlers in Salem, Charlestown, Boston, 
Roxbury, Dorchester, Watertown, and a little group of 
houses halfway between Watertown and Boston and 
known for a while simply as the New Town. This 
designation indicated its comparative youth ; it was 
about a year younger than its sister towns ! Nothing 
was said in the charter about a popular representative 
assembly, and at first the government did not feel the 
need of one. They were men of strong characters, 



ON THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 137 

who knew what they wanted and intended to have it. 
They had selected the New Town for a seat of govern- 
ment, since it was somewhat less exposed to destruc- 
tion from a British fleet than Boston ; and these men 
were doing things well calculated to arouse the ire of 
King Charles. They felt themselves quite competent 
to sit in the New Town and make laws which should 
be binding upon all the neighbouring settlements. But 
they soon received a reminder that such was not the 
way in which freeborn Englishmen like to be treated. 
In 1 63 1 the governor, deputy-governor, and assistants 
decided that on its western side the New Town was too 
much exposed to attacks from Indians. Accordingly, 
it was voted that a palisade should be built extending 
about half a mile inland from Charles River, and a tax 
was assessed upon the towns to meet the expense of 
this fortification. The men of Watertown flatly re- 
fused to pay their share of this tax because they were 
not represented in the body which imposed it. These 
proceedings were followed by a great primary assembly 
of all the settlers competent to vote and it was decided 
that hereafter each town should send representatives 
to a general assembly, the assent of which should be 
necessary to all the acts of the governor and his coun- 
cil. Thus was inaugurated the second free republican 
government of America, the first having been inaugu- 
rated in Virginia thirteen years before, and both having 
been copied from the county government of England 
in the old English county court.^ 

^ " The experiment of federalism is not a new one. The Greeks applied 
to it their supple and inventive genius with many interesting results, but 
they failed because the only kind of popular government they knew was 
the town-meeting ; and of course you cannot bring together forty or fifty 
town-meetings from different points of the compass to some common centre 



138 CONNECTICUT'S INFLUENCE 

The protest of the Watertown men gave expression 
to a feehng that had many sympathizers in Dorchester 
and the New Town. For some reason these three 
towns happened to contain a considerable proportion 
of persons not fully in sympathy with the aims of 
Winthrop and Cotton and the other great leaders of 
the Puritan exodus. In the theocratic state which 
these leaders were attempting to found, one of the 
corner-stones, perhaps the chiefest corner-stone, was 
the restriction of the rights of voting and holding civil 
ofifice to members of the Congregational Church qual- 
ified for participation in the Lord's Supper. The 
ruling party in Massachusetts Bay believed that this 
restriction was necessary in order to guard against 
hidden foes and to assure sufficient power to the 
clergy ; but there were some who felt that the restric- 
tion would give to the clergy more power than was 
likely to be wisely used, and that its tendency was 
distinctly aristocratic. The minority which held these 
democratic views was more strongly represented in 
Dorchester, Watertown, and the New Town than 
elsewhere. Here, too, the jealousy of encroachments 
upon local self-government was especially strong, as 
illustrated in the protest of Watertown above men- 
tioned. It is also a significant fact that in 1633 

to carry on the work of government by discussion. But our forefathers 
under King Alfred, a thousand years ago, were familiar with a device which 
it had never entered into the mind of Greek or Roman to conceive : they 
sent from each township a couple of esteemed men to be its representatives 
in the county court. Here was an institution that admitted of indefinite 
expansion. That old English county court is now seen to have been the 
parent of all modern popular legislatures." [This and the succeeding 
notes are quoted from an address delivered by Dr. Fiske, October lo, 
1901, at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Middle- 
town.] 



ON THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 139 

Watertown and Dorchester led the way in instituting 
town government by selectmen. 

In September, 1633, there arrived upon the scene 
several interesting men, three of whom call for 
special mention. These were John Haynes, Samuel 
Stone, and Thomas Hooker. Haynes was born in 
Copford Hall, Essex, but the date of his birth is un- 
known, and the same may be said of the details of his 
early life. He is now remembered as the first governor 
of Connecticut and as having served in that capacity 
every alternate year until his death. He has been 
described as a man " of large estate and larger affec- 
tions ; of heavenly mind and spotless life, sagacious, 
accurate, and dear to the people by his benevolent 
virtues and disinterested conduct." Samuel Stone 
was born in Hertford in 1602, and was graduated at 
Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1627, being already 
known as a shrewd and tough controversialist, abound- 
ing in genial humour and sometimes sparkling with 
wit. Thomas Hooker was an older man, having 
been born in Markfield, Leicestershire, in 1586. He 
was graduated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and 
afterward became a fellow of that College. In 1626 
he was appointed assistant to a clergyman in Chelms- 
ford and preached there, but in 1630 was forbidden to 
preach by Archbishop Laud. For a while Hooker 
stayed in his home near Chelmsford and taught a school 
in Little Braddon, where he had for an assistant 
teacher John Eliot, afterward famous as the apostle to 
the Indians. This lasted but a few months. Things 
were made so disagreeable for Hooker that before the 
end of 1630 he made his way to Holland and stayed 
there until 1633, preaching in Rotterdam and Delft. 



I40 CONNECTICUT'S INFLUENCE 

At length, in the summer of 1633, he decided to go to 
New England and sailed in the good ship Griffin. 
In the same ship came Haynes and Stone, and upon 
their arrival in Massachusetts Bay all three established 
themselves at the New Town, which was soon to be 
called Cambridge. In the preceding year a congrega- 
tion from Braintree in Essex had come over to Mas- 
sachusetts and begun to settle near Mount Wollaston, 
where they left the name of Braintree on the map; but 
presently they removed to the New Town, where their 
accession raised the population to something like five 
hundred souls. Hooker, upon his arrival, was chosen 
pastor and Stone was chosen teacher of the New 
Town church. 

During the ensuing year expressions of dissent from 
the prevailing policy began to be heard more distinctly 
than before in the New Town. Among the questions 
which then agitated the community was one which 
concerned the form which legislation should take. 
Many of the people expressed a wish that a code of 
laws might be drawn up, inasmuch as they naturally 
wished to know what was to be expected of law-abid- 
ing citizens; but the general disposition of the min- 
isters was to withstand such requests and to keep things 
undecided until a body of law should grow up through 
the decisions of courts in which the ministers them- 
selves played a leading part. The controversy over 
this question was kept up until 1647, when the popular 
party, if we may so call it, carried the day, and caused 
a code of law to be framed. This code, of which 
Nathaniel Ward was the draughtsman, was known as 
the Body of Liberties. In all this prolonged discus- 
sion the representative assembly was more or less 



ON THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 141 

opposed by the council of assistants. In short, there 
was a very clear division in Massachusetts between 
what we may call the aristocratic and democratic 
parties. Perhaps it would also be correct to distinguish 
them as the theocratic and secular parties. On the 
one side were the clergymen and aristocrats who 
wished to make political power the monopoly of a few, 
while on the other hand a considerable minority of the 
people wished to secularize the politics of the commu- 
nity and place it upon a broader basis. The foremost 
spokesmen of these two parties were the two great 
ministers, John Cotton and Thomas Hooker. Both 
were men of force, sagacity, tact, and learning. They 
were probably the two most powerful intellects to be 
found on Massachusetts Bay. Their opinions were 
clearly expressed. Hooker said, " In matters of 
greater consequence, which concern the common good, 
a general council, chosen by all, to transact businesses 
which concern all, I conceive, under favour, most suit- 
able to rule and most safe for relief of the whole." 
Here we have one of the fundamental theorems of 
democracy stated in admirably temperate language. 
On the other hand. Cotton said, " Democracy I do 
not conceive that ever God did ordain as a fit govern- 
ment either for church or commonwealth." Hooker 
also had more or less discussion with Winthrop, in 
which it appeared that the ideal of the former was 
government of the people by the people, while that of 
the latter was government of the people by a selected 
few. 

Among the principal adherents of Hooker were 
John Warham, the pastor, and John Maverick, the 
teacher, of Dorchester, both of them natives of Exeter 



142 CONNECTICUT'S INFLUENCE 

in Devonshire. There was also George Phillips, a 
graduate of Cambridge, who had since 1630 been pas- 
tor of the church at Watertown. Another adherent 
was Roger Ludlow of Dorchester, a brother-in-law of 
Endicott. Ludlow had been trained for the bar and 
was one of the most acute and learned of the Puritan 
settlers. The vicissitudes of his life might perhaps 
raise a suspicion that wherever there was a govern- 
ment, he was " agin it." At all events, he was con- 
spicuous in opposition at the time of which we are 
speaking. 

By 1635 many reports had come to Boston of the 
beautiful smiling fields along the Connecticut River. 
Attention had been called to the site of Hartford, 
because here the Dutch had built a rude blockhouse 
and exchanged defiances with boats from Plymouth 
coming up the river. At the river's mouth the Say- 
brook fort, lately founded, served to cut off the Dutch 
fortress of Good Hope from its supports on the Hud- 
son River, and all the rest of what is now Connecticut 
was rough and shaggy woodland. All at once it ap- 
peared that in the congregations of Dorchester, Water- 
town, and the New Town, a strong desire had sprung 
up of migrating to the banks of the Connecticut. 
There was no unseemly controversy, as in the cases 
of Roger Williams and Mrs. Hutchinson. This case 
was not parallel to theirs, for Hooker was no heresiarch 
and Massachusetts was most anxious to keep him and 
his friends. To lose three large congregations would 
but aggravate its complaint of poverty in men. More- 
over, antaofonists like Hooker and Cotton knew how 
to be courteous. When the discontented congrega- 
tions petitioned the General Court for leave to with- 



ON THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 143 

draw from the neighbourhood, the reasons which they 
alleged were so ludicrous as to make it plain that they 
were merely set forth as pretexts to do duty instead 
of the real reasons. It was alleged, for example, that 
they had not room enough to pasture their cattle. The 
men who said this must have had to hold their sides 
to keep from bursting with laughter. Not enough room 
in Cambridge for five hundred people to feed their 
cattle ! Why, then, did they not simply send a swarm 
into the adjacent territory, — into what was by and by 
to be parcelled out as Lexington and Concord and 
Acton ? Why flit a hundred miles through the wilder- 
ness and seek an isolated position open to attack from 
many quarters ? It is impossible to read the fragmen- 
tary records without seeing that the weighty questions 
were kept back ; but there is one telltale fact which is 
worth reams of written description. In the state 
which these men went away and founded on the banks 
of our noble river there was no limitation of the suf- 
frage to members of the churches. In words of per- 
fect courtesy the ministers and magistrates of Boston 
deprecated the removal of a light-giving candlestick, 
but the candlestick could not be prevailed on to stay, 
and the leave so persistently sought was reluctantly 
granted. 

A wholesale migration ensued. About eight hundred 
persons made their way through the forest to their new 
homes on the farther bank of the Connecticut River. 
The Dorchester congregation made the settlement 
which they called at first by the same name, but presently 
changed it to Windsor. The men from Watertown 
built a new Watertown lower down, which was pres- 
ently rechristened Wethersfield ; and between them 



144 CONNECTICUT'S INFLUENCE 

the congregation from the New Town, led by its pastor 
and teacher, halted near the Dutch fort and called their 
settlement Hartford, after Stone's English birthplace. 
About half of the migration seems to have come to 
Hartford, and the wholesale character of it may be best 
appreciated when we learn that of the five hundred 
inhabitants of Cambridge at the beginning of the year, 
only fifty were left at the end of it. Truly, our good 
city on the Charles was well-nigh depopulated. A great 
many empty houses would have been consigned to decay 
but for one happy circumstance. Just as Hooker's peo- 
ple were leaving, a new congregation from England was 
arriving. These were the learned Thomas Shepard 
and his people. They needed homes, of course, and 
the houses of the seceders were to be had at reason- 
able prices. I cannot refrain from mentioning, before 
taking my departure from this part of the subject with 
the seceders, that Shepard's people were much more in 
harmony with the Massachusetts theocracy than their 
predecessors. Indeed, when in that very year it was 
decided that the colony must have a college, it was 
further decided to place it in the New Town where its 
students and professors might sit under the preaching 
of Mr. Shepard, a man so acute and diligent in detect- 
ing and eradicating heresy that it could by no possi- 
bility acquire headway in his neighbourhood. Thus 
Harvard College was founded by graduates of the 
ancient university on the Cam ; and thus did the New 
Town at last acquire its name of Cambridge. But alas 
for human foresight ! The first president that Harvard 
had was expelled from his place for teaching heresy, 
being neither more nor less than a disbeliever in the 
propriety of infant baptism ! 



ON THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 145 

At first the seceders said nothing about escaping 
from the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, and indeed, the 
permission granted to the Watertown congregation ex- 
pressly provided that in their new home they should 
remain a part of that commonwealth. What Hooker 
and his friends may have at first intended we do not 
really know. One thing is clear : they waited until 
their new homes were built before they took the great 
question of government in hand. At about the same 
time a party from Roxbury migrated westward and 
founded Springfield higher up the river. Their leader, 
William Pynchon, was more than once in very bad 
repute with the people of Boston ; and some years later 
he published in London a treatise on the Atonement, 
which our Boston friends solemnly burned in the mar- 
ket-place by order of the General Court. 

For a couple of years the affairs of Windsor, Hart- 
ford, and Wethersfield were managed by a commission 
from Massachusetts in which William Pynchon and 
Roger Ludlow were the leading spirits. There was a 
difference in the position of Springfield and the three 
lower towns with reference to the government in 
Boston. The charter of the Massachusetts Company 
granted it a broad strip of land running indefinitely 
westward. With the imperfect geographical know- 
ledge of that time and in the entire absence of surveys, 
it was possible for Massachusetts to claim Springfield 
as situated within her original grant. No such claim, 
however, was possible in the case of the three lower 
towns.^ Latitude settled the business for them to the 

^ " The new towns, Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield, were indispu- 
tably outside of the jurisdiction of Massachusetts in so far as grants from 

the crown could go.*' 

: I. 



146 CONNECTICUT'S INFLUENCE 

satisfaction of anybody who could use a sextant. If 
they chose to set up for themselves, Massachusetts 
could find no reasonable ground upon which to oppose 
them. Moreover, it was distinctly bad policy for Mas- 
sachusetts to be too exigent in such a matter, or to 
make the Connecticut seceders her enemies. Massa- 
chusetts was playing a part of extraordinary boldness 
with reference to the British government. It took all 
the skill and resources of one of the most daring and 
sagacious statesmen that ever lived (and such John 
Winthrop certainly was) to steer that ship safely among 
the breakers that threatened her, and to quarrel with 
such worthy friends as the men of Connecticut, except 
for some most imperative and flagrant cause, would be 
the height of folly. 

Thus left quite free to act for themselves, the three 
river towns almost from the beginning behaved as an 
independent community. In May, 1637, a legislature 
called a General Court was assembled at Hartford. A 
committee of three from each town, meeting at Hart- 
ford, elected six magistrates and administered to them 
an oath of ofifice. The government thus established 
superseded the commission from Massachusetts, and it 
is worth noting that it derived its authority directly 
from the three towns. In the nine deputies we have 
the germ of the representative assembly, and in the six 
elected magistrates we have the analogue of the Mas- 
sachusetts council of assistants. 

The relations of the towns, however, needed better 
definition, and on the 14th of January, 1639, a conven- 
tion met at Hartford which framed and adopted a 
written constitution, creating the commonwealth of 
Connecticut. The name of this written constitution 



ON THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 147 

was " The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut." ^ 
These Orders, as already observed, placed no ecclesi- 
astical restrictions upon the suffrage, but gave it to all 
admitted freemen who had taken the oath of fidelity to 
the commonwealth ; and lest there should be any doubt 
who were to be regarded as admitted freemen, the Gen- 
eral Court afterward declared that the phrase meant 
all who had been admitted by a town. From this it 
appears that in Connecticut the towns were the original 
sources of power, just as in our great federal republic 
the original sources of power are the states. It was 
perfectly well understood that each town was absolutely 
self-governing in all that related to its own local affairs, 
and that all powers not expressly conferred upon the 
General Court by these Fundamental Orders remained 
with the town. One express direction to the towns 
reminds one of the provision in our Federal Constitu- 
tion that it shall guarantee to each state a republican 
form of government. In like manner the Funda- 
mental Orders provide that each town shall choose a 
number of its inhabitants not exceeding seven to admin- 
ister its affairs from year to year. With regard to the 
General Court, it was ordered that each town should 
send four deputies to represent it until the number of 
towns should so increase that this rule would make an 
assembly inconveniently large, in which case the num- 

^ '' This was the first instance known to history in which a common- 
wealth was created in such a way. Much eloquence has been expended 
over the compact drawn up and signed by the Pilgrims in the cabin of the 
Mayflower, and that is certainly an admirable document ; but it is not a 
constitution ; it does not lay down the lines upon which a government is to 
be constructed. It is simply a promise to be good and to obey the laws. 
On the other hand, the * Fundamental Orders of Connecticut' summon 
into existence a state government which is. with strict limitations, para- 
mount over the local governments of the three towns, its creators." 



148 CONNECTICUT'S INFLUENCE 

ber for each town might be reduced. The noticeable 
feature is that the towns were to be equally represented, 
without regard to their population. This feature gives 
a distinctly federal character to this remarkable con- 
stitution. In the face of this fact it cannot well be 
denied that the original Connecticut was a federation 
of towns. A careful and detailed study of the history 
of the two states would further convince us that the 
town has always had more importance in Connecticut 
than in Massachusetts. 

With regard to the governor, there was to be a sys- 
tem of popular election without any preliminary nomi- 
nation. An election was to be held each year in the 
spring, at which every freeman was entitled to hand to 
the proper persons a paper containing the name of the 
person whom he desired for governor. The papers 
were then counted and the name which was found on 
the greatest number of ballots was declared elected. 
Here we have the popular election by a simple plural- 
ity vote. As for the six magistrates, the deputies from 
each town in the General Court might nominate two 
candidates, and the court as a whole mxight nominate 
as many more as it liked. This nomination was not 
to be acted upon until the next or some subsequent 
meeting of the Court. When the time came for 
choosing six, the secretary read the names of the 
candidates, and in the case of each candidate every 
freeman was to bring in a written ballot which signi- 
fied a vote in his favour, and a blank ballot which was 
equivalent to a black-ball, and he who had more votes 
than black-balls was chosen. 

Into the details of this constitution I need not go, 
but may dismiss it with a few general remarks. 



ON THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 149 

In the first place, it was the first written constitu- 
tion known to history that created a government. 

Secondly^ it makes no allusion to any sovereign 
beyond seas, nor to any source of authority whatever 
except the three towns themselves. 

Thirdly, it created a state which was really a tiny 
federal republic, and it recognized the priiiciple of 
federal equality by equality of representation among 
the towns, while at the same time it recognized popu- 
lar sovereignty by electing its governor and its Upper 
House by a plurality vote. 

Fourthly, let m-e repeat, it co7iferred upon the Gen- 
eral Court 07tly such powers as were expressly granted. 
In these peculiarities we may see how largely it served 
as a precedent for the Cojtstitutiojt of the United 
States} 

^ "This is not the place for inquiring into the origin of written constitu- 
tions. Their precursors in a certain sense were the charters of mediaeval 
towns, and such documents as the Great Charter of 1215 by which the 
English sovereign was bound to respect sundry rights and hberties of his 
people. Our colonial charters were in a sense constitutions, and laws that 
infringed them could be set aside by the courts. By rare good fortune, 
aided by the consummate tact of the younger Winthrop, Connecticut 
obtained in 1662 such a charter, which confirmed her in the possession of 
her liberties. But these charters were always, in form at least, a grant of 
privileges from an overlord to a vassal, something given or bartered by a 
superior to an inferior. With the constitution which created Connecticut 
it was quite otherwise. You may read its eleven articles from beginning 
to end, and not learn from it that there was ever such a country as England 
or such a personage as the British sovereign. It is purely a contract, in 
accordance with which we the people of these three river towns propose to 
conduct our public affairs. Here is the form of government which com- 
mends itself to our judgment, and we hereby agree to obey it while we 
reserve the right to amend it. Unlike the Declaration of Independence, 
this document contains no theoretical phrases about liberty and equality, 
and it is all the more impressive for their absence. It does not deem it 
necessary to insist upon political freedom and upon equality before the law, 
but it takes them for granted and proceeds at once to business. Surely 



150 CONNECTICUT'S INFLUENCE 

But it was not only in the league of the three river 
towns that the principles of town autonomy and feder- 
ation were asserted. Let us turn aside for a moment 
and consider some of the circumstances under which 
the sister colony of New Haven was founded. The 
headlong overthrow of the Pequots in the spring of 
1637 and the pursuit of the fugitive remnant of the 
tribe had made New England settlers acquainted with 
the beautiful shores of Long Island Sound. Just at 
that time , a new company arrived in Boston from 
England. The general purpose of these newcomers 
was nearly identical with that of the magistrates in 
Boston. They desired a theocratic government of 
aristocratic type in which the clergy and magistrates 
should possess the chief share of power, and they also, 
like the Boston clergy, were unwilling for the present 
to concede a definite code of laws. Why, then, did not 
this new party remain in the neighbourhood of Boston? 
They would have done much toward healing that 
complaint of poverty in men of which John Cotton 
spoke; and one would suppose moreover that after 
having recently suffered from so large a secession as 
that which founded the three river towns of Connecti- 
cut the Boston people would have been over-anxious 
to retain these newcomers in their neighbourhood. 
Nevertheless, it was amicably arranged that the new 
party, of which John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton 
were the leaders, should try its fortunes on the coast 
of Long Island Sound. Massachusetts colony of 
course had no authority to restrain them. If they 
chose to go outside the limits of the Massachusetts 

this was the true birth of American democracy, and the Connecticut Val- 
ley was its birthplace ! " 



ON THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 151 

charter and thus be free at once from its restrictions 
and its protection, it was open to them to do so. 
What could have been their motive ? The records 
of the time leave us in some doubt, but I suspect that 
they found the minority in Massachusetts too trouble- 
some. There was a very considerable minority which 
disapproved of the theocratic policy, and although it 
had been weakened by the departure of the Connecticut 
men, yet it still remained troublesome and grew more 
so from year to year until after two generations it con- 
tributed to the violent overthrow of the Massachusetts 
charter. In the summer of 1637 the air of Boston was 
dense with complaints of theological and political 
strife, and one may believe that the autocratic Daven- 
port preferred to try his fortunes in a new and untried 
direction. Not only was the Old World given over 
to the Man of Sin, but that uncomfortable personage 
had even allowed his claws and tail to make an appear- 
ance among the saints of Boston. 

For such reasons, doubtless, the Davenport party 
came into the Sound and chose for their settlement 
the charming bay of Quinnipiac. They called their 
settlement New Haven, with a double meaning, as 
commemorating old English associations and as an 
earnest of the spiritual rest which they hoped to secure. 
In the course of the years 1638 and 1639 settlements 
were also made at Milford and Guilford and in 1640 
at Stamford. Somewhat later the towns of Bramford 
and Southold on Long Island were added.^ 

^ " In the eventful year 1639, Roger Ludlow, of Windsor, led a swarm to 
Fairfield, the settlement of which was soon followed by that of Stratford at 
the mouth of the Housatonic River. This forward movement separated 
Stamford from its sister towns of the New Haven republic. Then in 1644 
Connecticut bought Saybrook from the representatives of the grantees, Lord 



152 CONNECTICUT'S INFLUENCE 

Now these infant towns did not at the first moment 
form themselves into a commonwealth, but they re- 
tained each its autonomy like the towns of ancient 
Greece, and each of these independent towns was little 
else than an independent congregation. All over New 
England the town was practically equivalent to the 
parish. In point of fact it was the English parish 
brought across the ocean and self-governing, without 
any subjection to a bishop. But nowhere perhaps 
was the identification of Church and State in the 
affairs of the town so complete as in these little 
communities on the banks of the Sound. In June of 
1639, less than half a year after the constitution of 
Connecticut, the planters of New Haven held a meet- 
ing in Robert Newman's lately finished barn, and 
agreed upon a constitution for New Haven. Mr. 
Davenport began by preaching a sermon from the text 
" Wisdom hath builded her house ; she hath hewn 
out her seven pillars." After the sermon six funda- 
mental orders were submitted to the meeting and 
adopted by a show of hands. The general purport of 
these orders was that only church members could vote 
and hold office. Even in that gathering of saints such 
a rule would disfranchise many, and it was not adopted 
without some opposition. It was then provided that 
all the freemen (that is, church members) should 

Saye and his friends, and in the next year a colony planted at the mouth of 
Pequot River was afterward called New London, and the name of the river 
was changed to Thames. Apparently Connecticut had an eye to the main 
chance, or, in modern parlance, to the keys of empire ; at all events, she 
had no notion of being debarred from access to salt water, and while she 
seized the mouths of the three great rivers, she claimed the inheritance of 
the Pequots, including all the lands where that domineering tribe had ever 
exacted tribute." 



ON THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 153 

choose twelve of their number as electors, and that 
these twelve should choose the seven magistrates who 
were to administer the affairs of the settlement. These 
magistrates were really equivalent to selectmen ; they 
were known as pillars of the church. It was further- 
more agreed that the Holy Scriptures contain perfect 
rules for the ordering of all affairs civil and domestic 
as well as ecclesiastical. So far was this principle ap- 
plied that New Haven refused to have trial by jury 
because no such thing could be found in the Mosaic 
law. The assembling of freemen for an annual elec- 
tion was simply the meeting of church members to 
choose the twelve electors, while the rest of the people 
had nothing to say. It was therefore as far as possible 
from the system adopted by the three river towns. 
The constitution of Connecticut was democratic, that 
of New Haven aristocratic. Connecticut, moreover, 
at its beginning was a federation of towns ; New 
Haven at its beginning was simply a group of towns 
juxtaposed but not confederated. 

Nevertheless, circumstances soon drove the New 
Haven towns into federation, and here for a moment 
let us pause to consider how federation was inevitably 
involved in this whole process which we have been 
considering. We have seen that the principal reason 
why New England did not develop into a single solid 
state like Virginia or Pennsylvania, but into a conge- 
ries of scattered communities, was to be found in the 
slight but obstinate differences between different par- 
ties of settlers on questions mainly of church polity, 
sometimes of doctrine; and we must remember that 
the isolation of these communities was greater than we 
can easily realize, because our minds are liable to be 



154 CONNECTICUT'S INFLUENCE 

confused by the consolidation that has come since. 
There were three or four towns on the Piscataqua as 
a beginning for New Hampshire; there were ten or 
twelve towns about Boston harbour; two or three in 
Plymouth colony ; two or three more on Rhode Island 
besides Roger Williams's plantation at Providence, 
and presently Gorton's at Warwick ; then there was a 
lonely fortress at Saybrook ; and lastly, the federation 
of Connecticut and the scattered molecules of New 
Haven. The first result of so much dispersal had been 
a deadly war with the Indians, and although the anni- 
hilation of the Pequots served as a dreadful warning 
to all red men, yet danger was everywhere so immi- 
nent as to make some kind of union necessary for 
bringing out in case of need the military strength 
of these scattered communities. Thus arose the fa- 
mous New England confederation of 1643, in which 
Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Ha- 
ven united their fortunes.^ Now when the question of 
forming this federation came up, New Haven could 
not very well afford to be left out. She possessed only 
the territory which she had bought from the Indians, 
while Connecticut, with an audacity like that of old 
world empires, claimed every rood of land the occu- 
pants of which had ever paid tribute to the extin- 

1 " This act of sovereignty was undertaken without any consultation with 
the British government or any reference to it. The Confederacy received 
a serious blow in 1662, when Charles II. annexed New Haven, without its 
consent, to Connecticut ; but it had a most useful career still before it, for 
without the aid of a single British regiment or a single gold piece from 
the Stuart treasury, it carried New England through the frightful ordeal of 
King Philip's War, and came to an honoured end when it was forcibly dis- 
placed by the arbitrary rule of Andros. It would be difficult to overstate 
the importance of this New England federation as a preparatory training 
for the greater work of federation a century later.'' 



ON THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 155 

guished Pequots. She was laying one finger upon 
the Thames River and another upon the Housatonic, 
while she sent parties of settlers to Fairfield and Strat- 
ford, thus curtailing and invading New Haven's natu- 
ral limits. " In union there is strength," and so the 
towns of the New Haven colony united themselves 
into a little federal republic. 

I need not pursue this subject, for I have said enough 
to indicate the points which concern us to-day. Let me 
only mention one interesting feature of the events which 
annexed aristocratic New Haven to her democratic 
neighbour. When I say aristocratic New Haven, I am 
not thinking of dress and furniture and worldly riches; 
yet it was a matter of comment that the New Haven 
leaders were wealthy, that panelled wainscots and costly 
rugs and curtains were seen in their houses when there 
was as yet nothing of that sort to be found in the three 
river towns, and that they were inclined to plume them- 
selves upon possessing the visible refinements of life. 
The policy of their theocracy toward the British crown 
was very bold, like that of Massachusetts, but it was 
imprudent inasmuch as they were far from having the 
strength of the older colony. It is a thrilling story, that 
of the hunt for the regicides, and Davenport's defiant 
sermon on the occasion. It was magnificent, but it was 
not diplomacy. On the other hand, the policy of Con- 
necticut at that time was shaped by a remarkable man, 
no less than John Winthrop, son of the great founder 
of Massachusetts, a man of vast accomplishments, 
scientific and literary, a fellow of the Royal Society. 
Inheriting much of his father's combination of audacity 
with velvet tact, he knew at once how to maintain the 
rights and claims of Connecticut and how to make 



156 CONNECTICUT'S INFLUENCE 

Charles II. think him the best fellow in the world. We 
have seen that in making her first constitution Con- 
necticut did not so much as allude to the existence of 
a British government ; but in the stormy times of the 
Restoration that sort of thing would no longer do. So 
the astute Winthrop sought and obtained a royal charter 
which simply gave Connecticut what she had already, 
namely, the government which she had formed for her- 
self, and which was so satisfactorily republican that she 
did not need to revise it in 1776, but lived on with it 
well into the nineteenth century. This charter defined 
her territory in such a way as to include naughty New 
Haven, which was thus summarily annexed. And how 
did New Haven receive this ? The disfranchised mi- 
nority hailed the news with delight. The disgruntled 
theocrats in great part migrated to New Jersey, and the 
venerable Davenport went to end his days in Boston. 
Between New Haven and Boston the sympathy had 
always been strong. The junction with Connecticut 
was greatly facilitated by the exodus of malcontents to 
New Jersey, and it was not long before the whole of 
what is now Connecticut had grown together as an 
extensive republic composed of towns whose union 
presented in many respects a miniature model of our 
present great federal commonwealth. 

We may now in conclusion point to the part which 
Connecticut played in the formation of the federal con- 
stitution under which we live. You will remember that 
there was strong opposition to such a constitution in 
most of the states. Everywhere there was a lurking 
dread of what might be done by a new and untried 
continental power, possessing powers of taxation and 
having a jurisdiction beyond and in some respects 



ON THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 157 

above those of the separate thirteen states. You will 
remember that the year 1 786 was one in which civil 
war was threatened in many quarters, and something 
approaching civil war actually existed in Massachusetts. 
The opposition between North and South was feeble 
compared to what it afterward became, yet there was 
real danger that the Kentucky settlements would secede 
from the Union and be followed by the Southern states. 
The jealousy between large and small states was 
more bitter than it is now possible for us to realize. 
War seemed not unlikely between New York and 
New Hampshire, and actually imminent between New 
York and her two neighbours, Connecticut and New 
Jersey. It was in a solemn mood that our statesmen 
assembled in Philadelphia, and the first question to be 
settled, one that must be settled before any further 
work could be done, was the way in which power was 
to be shared between the states and the general gov- 
ernment. 

It was agreed that there should be two houses in the 
federal legislature, and Virginia, whose statesmen, led 
by George Washington and James Madison, were tak- 
ing the lead in the constructive work of the moment, 
insisted that both houses should represent population. 
To this the large states assented; while the small 
states, led by New Jersey, would have nothing of the 
sort, but insisted that representation in the federal 
legislature should be only by states. Such an arrange- 
ment would have left things very much as they were 
under the old federation. It would have left Congress 
a mere diplomatic body representing a league of 
sovereign states. If such were to be the outcome of 
the combination, it might as well not have met. 



158 CONNECTICUT'S INFLUENCE 

» 

The bitterness and fierceness of the controversy 
was extreme. Gunning Bedford of Delaware ex- 
claimed to the men of whom James Madison was the 
leader : " Gentlemen, I do not trust you. If you 
possess the power, the abuse of it could not be 
checked ; and what then would prevent you from 
exercising it to our destruction ? Sooner than be 
ruined, there are foreign powers who will take us by 
the hand." When talk of this sort could be indulged 
in, it was clear that the situation had become danger- 
ous. The convention was on the verge of breaking 
up, and the members were thinking of going home, 
their minds clouded and their hearts rent at the immi- 
nency of civil strife, when a compromise was suggested 
by Oliver Ellsworth of Windsor, Roger Sherman of 
New Haven, and William Samuel Johnson of Strat- 
ford, — three immortal names. These men represented 
Connecticut, the state which for a hundred and fifty 
years had been familiar with the harmonious cooper- 
ation of the federal and national principles. In the 
election of her governor Connecticut was a little 
nation ; in the election of her assembly she was a little 
confederation. However the case may stand under 
the altered conditions of the present time, Connecticut 
had in those days no reason to be dissatisfied with the 
working of her government. Her delegates suggested 
that the same twofold principle should be applied on a 
continental scale in the new constitution : let the 
national principle prevail in the House of Representa- 
tives and the federal principle in the Senate. 

This happy thought was greeted with approval by 
the wise old head of Franklin, but the delegates 
obstinately wrangled over it until, when the question 



ON THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 159 

of equality of suffrage in the Senate was put to vote, 
the compromise went to the verge of defeat. The 
result was a tie. Had the vote of Georgia been given 
in the negative, it would have defeated the compromise ; 
but this catastrophe was prevented by the youthful 
Abraham Baldwin, a native of Guilford and lately a 
tutor in Yale College, who had recently emigrated to 
Georgia. Baldwin was not convinced of the desirable- 
ness of the compromise, but he felt that its defeat was 
likely to bring about that worst of calamities, the 
breaking up of the convention. He prevented such a 
calamity by voting for the compromise contrary to his 
colleague, whereby the vote of Georgia was divided 
and lost. 

Thus it was that at one of the most critical moments 
of our country's existence the sons of Connecticut 
played a decisive part and made it possible for the 
framework of our national government to be com- 
pleted. When we consider this noble climax and the 
memorable beginnings which led up to it, when we 
also reflect the mighty part which federalism is un- 
questionably destined to play in the future, we shall 
be convinced that there is no state in our Union 
whose history will better repay careful study than 
Connecticut. Surely few incidents are better worth 
turning over and over and surveying from all possi- 
ble points of view than the framing of a little con- 
federation of river towns at Hartford in January, 1639. 



V 



THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE OF THE 
BOSTON TEA PARTY 



2M 



THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BOSTON 
TEA PARTY 

It may be one of the symptoms of a wholesome re- 
action against the vapid Fourth of July rhetoric of the 
past generation that writers of our own day sometimes 
betray a tendency to belittle the events of the Revolu- 
tionary period. The smoke of that conflict is so far 
cleared away as to enable us to see that sometimes the 
popular leaders did things that were clearly wrong ; 
we find, too, that all the Tories were not quite so black 
as they have been painted ; and from such discoveries 
a reaction of feeling more or less extensive naturally 
arises. In the case of many scholars born and bred in 
the neighbourhood of Boston such a reaction has within 
the last few years been especially strong and marked. 
The immediate cause has doubtless been the publica- 
tion of the Diary and Letters of Thomas Hutchinson, 
the last royal governor of Massachusetts. 

In such waves of feeling there is apt to be a lack of 
discrimination ; bad things get praised along with the 
good, and good things get blamed along with the bad. 
An instance is furnished by an essay on " Boston 
Mobs before the Revolution," by the late Andrew 
Preston Peabody, published in the Atlantic Monthly, 
September, 1888. This interesting paper was called 
forth by the act of the Massachusetts legislature in 
voting a civic monument to Crispus Attucks and the 

163 



1 64 THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE 

other victims of the affray in King Street, commonly 
known as the " Boston Massacre." What we have to 
note especially in the paper is the fact that it expressly 
includes the Boston Tea Party among the reprehensi- 
ble riots of the time, and discerns no difference between 
its performance and the sacking of private houses by 
drunken ruffians. Furthermore, says Dr. Peabody, "the 
illegal seizure of the tea was in a certain sense parallel 
to the (so-called) respectable mob that in the infancy of 
the antislavery movement nearly killed Garrison, and 
made the jail his only safe place of refuge." This com- 
parison makes Dr. Peabody's view sufficiently explicit. 

In connection with the same affair of the Attucks 
monument, one of the most eminent historical scholars 
of Boston, Mr. Abner C. Goodell, in the course of a 
letter to the Boston Advertiser, said : " If the only les- 
son that the popular mind has derived from the disor- 
derly doings which preceded the Revolution is that 
they were the right things to be done and worthy of 
perpetual applause, it is high time that we adopt a 
rule never to mention such events as the affray in 
King Street and the destruction of the tea without 
expressions of unqualified disapprobation. Which of 
us would permit his sons to engage in such reprehen- 
sible proceedings to-day ? " This, again, is sufficiently 
explicit. The act of the Tea Party is unreservedly 
condemned, and no consciousness is indicated of the 
points in which it differed from a chance affray. 

It would not be right to leave these expressions of 
opinion without further reference to the time when 
they were written. Extensive strikes, especially of 
men employed on railroads, and accompanied with 
savage attempts at boycotting, had recently occurred 



OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY 165 

in St. Louis and other great cities, and something of 
the sort had been seen under the very shadow of Har- 
vard's elms in Cambridge. Both Dr. Peabody and 
Mr. Goodell make express mention of these recent 
disturbances, and either assert or imply that approval 
of any of the irregular acts in Boston which preceded 
the Revolution is equivalent to approval of modern 
boycotting with all its attendant outrages. Now, if 
there is any one source of confusion against which the 
student of history needs to be eternally vigilant, it is 
the tendency to argue from loose or false analogies. 
Every one remembers how Mr. Mitford, some seventy 
years ago, wrote a History of Ancient Greece under 
the influence of his dread of the approaching reform 
of Parliament, and a precious mess he made of it. In 
his eyes the one thing the Athenians had done for 
mankind was to give it an object lesson in the evils of 
democracy. Very little insight into history is gained 
by studying it in this way ; vague generalizations are 
grossly misleading; real knowledge is attained only 
when the events of a period are studied in their causal 
relations to one another amid all their concrete com- 
plexity. It is this which makes the study of history, 
rightly pursued, such a superb discipline for the intel- 
lectual powers. It is this which enables us to reach 
conclusions which have the force of reasoned convic- 
tions. There is something rather comical in the 
spectacle of a writer whose verdicts upon past events 
are at the mercy of the next ragamuffin who may throw 
a bomb in Chicago or set fire to a barn in Vermont. 

The opinions here quoted seem to show that in the 
current notions concerning the immediate causes of the 
American Revolution there is too much vague generali- 



1 66 THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE 

zation, with a very inadequate grasp of the situation in 
its definite and concrete details. It is worth our while, 
then, to approach once more the well-worn theme, and 
see if it is not possible to make a statement which 
shall be at once historically true and fair to all parties 
concerned. 

First, we must note the fundamental fact out of which 
the American Revolution took its rise. A revolution 
need not necessarily have arisen from such a fact, but 
it did. The fundamental fact was the need for a 
continental revenue, whereas no such thing existed as 
a continental government with taxing power. This 
need was vividly brought out by seventy years of war 
with France. At the time of the treaty of Paris, in 
1763, the need for a permanent continental government 
with taxing power had long been forcibly shown, though 
people were everywhere obstinately unwilling to admit 
the fact. For seventy-four years the colonies had been 
in a condition varying from armed truce to open war- 
fare with France. The struggle began in 1 689, when the 
Dutch stadtholder became king of Great Britain, when 
Andros was overthrown at Boston, and Leisler seized 
the government of New York, and Frontenac was sent 
over to Canada with vast designs. Occasionally this 
struggle came to a pause, but it was never really ended 
till, in 1 763, France lost every rood of land she had ever 
possessed in North America. At first it was only the 
New England colonies and New York that were di- 
rectly concerned, and in Leisler's Congress of 1690 no 
colony south of Maryland was represented. But by the 
time when Robert Dinwiddle ruled in Virginia all the 
colonies came to be involved, and the war in its latest 
stage assumed continental dimensions. Regular troops 



OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY 1 67 

from Great Britain assisted the colonies and were sup- 
ported by the imperial exchequer. The colonies con- 
tributed men and money to the cause, as it was right 
they should ; and here the need of a continental taxing 
power soon made itself disastrously felt. The drift of 
circumstances had brought the thirteen colonies into 
the presence of what we may call a continental state 
of things, but nowhere was there any single hand that 
could take a continental grasp of the situation. There 
were thirteen separate governors to ask for money and 
thirteen distinct legislatures to grant it. Under these 
circumstances the least troublesome fact was that the 
colonies remote from the seat of danger for the moment 
did not contribute their fair share. Usually the case 
was worse than this. It often happened that the legisla- 
ture of a colony immediately threatened with invasion 
would refuse to make its grant unless it could wring 
some concession from the governor in return. Thus, 
in Pennsylvania, there was the burning question as to 
taxing the proprietary lands, and more than once, while 
firebrand and tomahawk were busy on the frontier, did 
the legislature sit quietly at Philadelphia, seeking to use 
the public distress as a tool with which to force the 
governor into submission. It is an old story how it 
proved impossible to get horses for the expedition 
against Fort Duquesne until Benjamin Franklin sent 
around to the farmers and pledged his personal credit 
for them. Sometimes the case was even worse, as in 
1 764, when Pontiac's confederates were wreaking such 
havoc in the Alleghanies, and Connecticut did not feel 
sufficient interest in the woes of Pennsylvania to send 
them assistance. Such lamentable want of cooperation 
and promptness often gave advantages to the enemy 



1 68 THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE 

which neutrahzed their immense and permanent disad- 
vantages of fighting on exterior lines. 

The royal governors all understood these things, and 
felt them keenly. As a rule they were honourable men, 
with a strong sense of responsibility for the welfare of 
their provinces. They saw clearly that, to bring out 
the military resources of the country, some kind of 
continental government with taxing powers was 
needed. 

Any such continental government was regarded by 
the people with fear and loathing. The sentiment of 
union between colonies had not come into existence, 
the feeling of local independence was intense and jeal- 
ous, and a continental government was an unknown 
and untried horror. So late as 1788, when grim 
necessity had driven the people of the United States 
to adopt our present Constitution as the alternative to 
anarchy, it was with shivering dread that most of them 
accepted the situation. A quarter of a century earlier 
the repugnance was much stronger. 

It should never be lost sight of that the difficulty 
with which the royal governors had to contend in the 
days of the French War was exactly the same difiiculty 
with which the Continental Congress had to contend 
throughout the War of Independence and the critical 
period that followed it. We cannot understand Ameri- 
can history until this fact has become part of our per- 
manent mental structure. The difficulty was exactly 
the same ; . it was the absence of a continental govern- 
ment with taxing power. The Continental Congress 
had no such power ; it could only ask the state legisla- 
tures for money, just as the royal governors had done, 
and if it took a state three years to raise what was 



OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY 1 69 

sorely needed within three months, there was no help 
for it. Hence the slowness and feebleness with which 
the War of Independence was conducted. When the 
Congress asked for an army of ninety thousand men 
for the year 1777, the demand was moderate and could 
have been met without a greater strain than was cheer- 
fully borne during our Civil War ; but the army fur- 
nished in response never reached thirty thousand, 
and the following years made even a poorer show. 
Our statesmen were then learning by hard experience 
exactly what the royal governors had learned before, — 
that work of continental dimensions, such as a great 
foreign war, required a continental government to 
conduct it, and that no government is worthy of the 
name unless it can raise money by taxation. After the 
peace of 1783 our statesmen were soon taught by 
abundant and ugly symptoms that in the absence of 
such a government the states were in imminent danger 
of falling apart and coming to blows with each other. 
It was only this greater dread that drove our people 
to do most reluctantly in 1788 what they had scorn- 
fully refused to do in 1 754, and consent to the estab- 
lishment of a continental government with taxing 
power. Let us not forget, then, that from first to 
last the difficulty was one and the same. 

If we had surmounted the difficulty in 1754, the 
separation from Great Britain might perhaps not 
have occurred at all. In that year the prospect of 
an immediate renewal of war with France made it 
necessary to confer with the chiefs of the Six Nations, 
and in the congress that assembled at Albany Benjamin 
Franklin proposed a plan which, had it been adopted, 
would doubtless have surmounted the difficulty. It 



170 THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE 

would have created a federal government, with power 
of taxation for federal purposes, with local rights fully 
guaranteed, and with a president or governor-general 
appointed by the crown. The royal governors of 
course approved the plan, the people treated it with 
indignant contempt ; the difficulty was acutely felt all 
through the war, and then the British Parliament, in a 
perfectly friendly spirit, tried to mend matters. 

The necessity for a continental revenue continued, 
and always would continue. Scarcely had peace been 
made with France when Pontiac's terrible war broke 
out and furnished fresh illustrations of the perennial 
difficulty. Since the Americans would not create a 
continental taxing power for themselves. Parliament 
must undertake to supply the place of such a power. 
The failure of Franklin's plan of union seemed to 
force this work upon Parliament ; certainly there was 
no other body that could raise money for the requisite 
continental purposes. 

But when Parliament undertook such a step it ven- 
tured upon an untrodden field. No Parliament had 
ever raised money in America by direct taxation. As 
for port duties the Americans had not actually resisted 
them. As for parliamentary legislation, in the very 
few instances in which it had been attempted, as for 
example in the case of the Massachusetts Land Bank 
of 1740, the colonists had submitted with an exceed- 
ingly ill grace, as much as to say, " You had better not 
try it again ! " According to the theory prevalent in 
the colonies and soon to be stated in print by Thomas 
Jefferson, they owed allegiance to the king but not to 
Parliament. The relation was like that of Hanover to 
Great Britain at that time, or like that of Norway 



OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY 171 

to Sweden at the present day, with one and the same 
king but separate and independent legislatures. On 
this theory the Americans had practically lived most 
of the time. But this point British statesmen and the 
British people did not realize. In their minds Parlia- 
ment was the supreme body at home ; even the king 
wore his crown by act of Parliament ; in the empire 
at large there must be supreme authority somewhere, 
and as it clearly was not in the king, it must be in 
Parliament. 

Accordingly, when George Grenville became prime 
minister, just as Pontiac's war was breaking out, he 
saw no harm in raising an American revenue for con- 
tinental purposes by act of Parliament. Grenville 
cared little for theories of government ; he was a man 
of business and liked to have things done promptly and 
in a shipshape manner. He was willing to have the 
Americans raise the revenue themselves ; only if they 
wouldn't do it, he would ; there must be no more shilly- 
shallying. What would be the least annoying kind of 
tax for the purpose ? Doubtless a stamp tax. William 
Shirley, the very popular royal governor of Massachu- 
setts, had said so ten years before, and there seemed 
to be reason in it. A stamp tax involves no awkward 
questions about private property and incomes, puts no 
premium upon lying, and entails as little expense as 
possible in its collection. Moreover, it cannot be 
evaded, and the proceeds all go into the treasury. 
So Grenville got his Stamp Act ready, but with 
commendable prudence and courtesy he gave the 
Americans a year's notice in advance, so that if they 
had anything better to suggest it might be duly con- 
sidered. 



172 THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE 

The Americans had no alternative to suggest except 
a system of requisitions, — in other words, asking the 
thirteen separate legislatures to vote supplies. With 
that system they had floundered along for three-quar- 
ters of a century, and with it they were to flounder for 
a quarter of a century more until their eyes should be 
opened. Grenville was tired of so much floundering, 
and so he brought in his Stamp Act, about which one 
of the most notable things is that Parliament passed 
it with scarcely a word of debate. There was no un- 
friendly intent in the measure. It was not designed 
to take money from American pockets for British pur- 
poses. Every penny was to be used in America for 
the defence of the colonies. Some of the stamps, 
indeed, were higher in price than they need have been, 
but on the whole there was little in the Stamp Act for 
the Americans to object to except to the principle 
upon which the whole thing was based. On that 
point Parliament was not sufficiently awake, though 
some demonstrations had already been made in Amer- 
ica and such men as Hutchinson had warned Grenville 
of the danger. 

When it was known in America that the Stamp 
Act had become law, the resistance took two forms : 
there was mob violence, and there was the sober appeal 
to reason. From the outset the law was nullified ; 
people simply would not touch the stamps or have 
anything to do with them. The story of the riots in 
New York and Boston needs no repetition, but one of 
the disgraceful scenes in Boston calls for mention 
in order to point the contrast which we shall have to 
make hereafter. Thomas Hutchinson, the foremost 
scholar of his time in America and the foremost writer, 



OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY 1 73 

except Franklin, was then chief justice of Massachu- 
setts. Some people believed him to have instigated 
the Stamp Act, which he had really opposed ; others, 
without due foundation, suspected him of having in- 
formed against sundry respectable citizens as smug- 
glers. So one night in August, 1765, a drunken mob 
sacked his house, destroyed his furniture and pictures, 
and ruined his splendid library. This affair was typi- 
cal of riots in general. It started at the suggestion of 
some unknown ruffian, its fury fell chiefly upon an 
innocent person, and its sole achievement was the 
wanton destruction of valuable property^ It was an 
event in the history of crime, and belongs among such 
incidents as fill the Newgate Calendar. How did the 
people of Massachusetts treat this affair.? Town- 
meetings all over the province condemned it in the 
strongest terms ; the leaders of the mob were thrown 
into prison, and the legislature promptly indemnified 
Hutchinson for his losses so far as money could repair 
them. The whole story shows that Massachusetts had 
no fondness for riots and rioters. 

Besides such cases of mob violence there was the 
sober appeal to reason, and the American case was for 
the first time distinctly and fully stated. The princi- 
ple of " no taxation without representation " was clearly 
set forth by Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams, and 
was incorporated in the resolutions adopted by the 
congress at New York. This was the formal answer 
of the Americans to Parliament. When it reached 
that body, it found George Grenville in opposition. 
Lord Rockingham had become Prime Minister, and a 
bill was brought in for the repeal of the Stamp Act. 
That measure had been passed almost without ques- 



174 THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE 

tion, but its repeal was the occasion of a debate that 
lasted nearly all winter. For the first time the consti- 
tutional relations of the colonies to the imperial gov- 
ernment were thoroughly discussed, and three distinct 
views found expression: i. The Tories held that 
the Stamp Act was all right and ought to be enforced. 
2. The New Whigs, represented by William Pitt, 
accepted the American doctrine of no taxation with- 
out representation, and urged that the Stamp Act 
should be repealed expressly as founded upon an erro- 
neous principle. 3. The Old Whigs, represented by 
Fox and Burke, refrained from committing themselves 
to such a doctrine, but considered it bad statesmanship 
to insist upon a measure which public opinion in 
America unanimously condemned. This third view 
prevailed, and the Stamp Act was repealed, while a 
Declaratory Resolve asserted the constitutional right 
of Parliament to legislate for the colonies in any way 
it might see fit. 

This result was rightly regarded as a practical vic- 
tory for the Americans, but it gave general satisfaction 
in England, for it seemed to remove a source of dispute 
that had most suddenly and unexpectedly loomed up 
in alarming proportions. The rejoicings in London 
were no less hearty than in New York. The affair 
had been creditably conducted. The dangerous ques- 
tion had been argued on broad, statesmanlike grounds, 
and the undue claims of Parliament had been virtually 
relinquished. It is true, the difficulty in America as 
to how that continental revenue was to be raised was 
left untouched. But friendly discussion might at length 
find a cure, or the question might be allowed to drop 
until some more favourable moment. 



OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY 1 75 

A situation, however, was arising which would soon 
put an end to friendly discussion, and which would 
neither let the question drop nor deal with it fairly. 
It is a pity that great political questions could not 
more often be argued in an atmosphere of sweetness 
and light. Their solution would exhibit a kind and 
degree of sense such as the world is not yet familiar 
with. Suppose that in i860 the Americans, north and 
south, could have discussed the whole slavery question 
without passion ; and suppose that all the slaves had 
been set free, and their owners compensated at their 
full market value; how small would have been the 
cost in dollars and cents compared with the cost of 
the Civil War, to say nothing of the saving of life ! 
Such a supposition seems grotesque, so great is the 
difference, in respect of foresight and self-control, be- 
tween the human nature implied in it and that with 
which we are familiar. It is to be hoped that the 
slow modifications wrought by civilized life will by and 
by bring mankind to that stage of wisdom which now 
seems unattainable ; but for many a weary year no 
doubt will still be seen the same old groping and stum- 
bling, the same old self-defeating selfishness. 

In 1 766 the questions connected with raising a con- 
tinental revenue in America might have been carried 
along toward a peaceful settlement, had it been possible 
to keep them out of politics. But that was impossible. 
The discussion over the Stamp Act had dragged the 
American question into British politics, and there was 
one wily and restless politician who soon came to stake 
his very political existence upon its solution. That pol- 
itician was the young king, George III., who was enter- 
ing upon his long reign with an arduous problem before 



176 THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE 

his mind, how to break* down cabinet government and 
parliamentary supremacy and convert the British state 
into a true monarchy. In order to carry out this pur- 
pose he reUed chiefly upon a kind of corruption in which 
the chief element was the fact that the representation 
in the House of Commons had got quite out of gear 
with the population of the country. During more than 
two centuries the change from mediaeval into modern 
England had come about without any redistribution 
of seats in that representative chamber. Some dis- 
tricts had been developing new trades and industries, 
while others had simply been overgrown with ivy and 
moss, until there had arisen that state of things so often 
quoted and described, in which Old Sarum without a 
human inhabitant had two members of Parliament, 
while Birmingham and Manchester had none. There 
were not less than a hundred rotten boroughs which 
ought to have been disfranchised without a moment's 
delay. They were for the most part implements of 
corruption, either bought up or otherwise controlled 
by leading Whig or Tory families, or by the king. 
For more than seventy years, ever since the expulsion 
of the Stuarts, this sort of corruption had been univer- 
sally relied on in English politics. During that time 
the Tories had been mostly discredited because of the 
Jacobite element in their party. This was especially 
the case in the reigns of George I. and George II., 
each of which had its Jacobite rebellion to suppress. 
The Old Whig families were then all-powerful, the 
first two Georges were simply their wards, and under 
the long and epoch-making administration of Sir 
Robert Walpole the modern system of cabinet govern- 
ment was set quite firmly upon its feet. Under this 



OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY 



177 



state of things with the elder Pitt for leader, England 
brought to a triumphant close a truly glorious war, one 
of the most important in which she had ever been 
engaged. Whenever it was needful for carrying a 
point in domestic or foreign policy, the great Whig 
leaders made free use of parliamentary corruption, 
though Pitt always proudly abstained from such 
methods. Much of the time a decisive vote in the 
Commons was thrown by members who were simply 
owned body and soul by the great Whig families. 

When George III. came to the throne in 1760, a 
boy of eighteen years, he had learned to regard this 
state of things with a feeling which may fairly be 
described as one of choking rage. It was not the cor- 
ruption that enraged him, but the subordination of 
the royal power. His aim in life, as defined from 
childhood, was to overthrow the Whig aristocracy and 
make himself a real monarch. There were two sets 
of circumstances which seemed to favour his ambition. 
In the first place, the disappearance of Jacobitism as 
an active political force brought the united Tory party 
to the support of the House of Hanover, so that there 
was a chance for the king to control a majority in 
Parliament. In the second place, the relations between 
the foremost political leaders happened to be such as 
to enable the king to frame a succession of short- 
lived and jarring ministries, thus bringing discredit 
upon cabinet government. Under such circumstances 
the young man was busily engaged in building up a 
party of personal adherents entirely dependent upon 
him as dispenser of patronage, when all at once the 
American question was thrown upon the stage in a 
way that alarmed him greatly. 



178 THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE 

For some years past there had been growing up in 
England a new party of Whigs very different from 
the country squires who so long had ruled the land. 
They represented the trades and industries of modern 
imperial England, they entertained many democratic 
ideas, and were disposed to be intolerant of ancient 
abuses. They saw that the whole body politic was 
poisoned by the rotten boroughs, and they knew that 
unless this source of corruption could be stopped 
there was an end of English freedom. Accordingly, 
in 1 745 these New Whigs, under the lead of William 
Pitt, began the great agitation for Parliamentary Re- 
form which only achieved its first grand triumph with 
Earl Grey and Lord John Russell in 1832. When 
the Stamp Act was repealed, in 1766, the question 
of Parliamentary Reform had been before the public 
for twenty-one years, and it largely determined the 
character of the speeches and votes upon that memo- 
rable occasion. 

The resolutions of Patrick Henry and Samuel 
Adams and the New York congress asserted in the 
boldest language the principle of "no taxation with- 
out representation." That was one of the watchwords 
of the New Whigs, and hence Pitt in urging the 
repeal of the Stamp Act adopted the American posi- 
tion in full. None could deny that it was a funda- 
mental and long-established principle of English 
liberty. It had been asserted by Simon de Mont- 
fort's Parliament in 1265; it had been expressly ad- 
mitted by Edward I. in 1301 ; and since then it had 
never been directly impugned with success, though 
some kings had found ways of partially evading it, as, 
for instance, in the practice of benevolences which 



OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY 1 79 

grew up during the Wars of the Roses and was with 
difficulty suppressed in the seventeenth century. No 
EngHshman could stand up and deny the principle of 
*' no taxation without representation " without incur- 
ring the risk of being promptly refuted. Neverthe- 
less the unreformed House of Commons had by slow 
stages arrived at a point where its very existence was 
a living denial of that principle. It was therefore im- 
possible to separate the American case from the case 
of Parliamentary Reform ; the very language in which 
the argument for Massachusetts and Virginia was 
couched involved also the argument for Birmingham 
and Manchester. Hence in the Stamp Act debate 
the Old Whigs, who were opposed to Parliamentary 
Reform, did not dare to adopt Pitt's position. That 
would have been suicidal ; so they were obliged to 
urge the repeal of the Stamp Act simply upon grounds 
of general expediency. 

The Old Whigs were opposed to reform because 
they felt that they needed the rotten boroughs in 
order to maintain control of Parliament. The king 
was opposed to reform for much the same reason. 
His schemes were based upon the hope of beating the 
Old Whigs at their own game, and securing by fair 
means or foul enough rotten boroughs to control Par- 
liament for his own purposes. In this policy he had 
for a time much success. The reform of Parliament 
would be the death-blow to all such schemes. The 
king felt that it would be the ruin of all his political 
hopes ; and this well-grounded fear possessed his half- 
crazy mind with all the overmastering force of a 
morbid fixed idea. Hence his ferocious hatred of the 
elder Pitt, and hence the savage temper in which after 



l8o THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE 

1766 he thrust himself into American affairs. When 
once this desperate political gamester had entered the 
field, it was no longer possible for those affairs to be 
discussed reasonably or dealt with according to the 
merits of the case. In the king's mind it all reduced 
itself to this : on the Stamp Act question the Ameri- 
cans had won a victory. That was not to be endured. 
Somehow or other a fight must be forced again on 
the question of taxation, and the Americans must be 
compelled to eat their own words and surrender the 
principle in which they had so confidently intrenched 
themselves. This was the spirit in which the king 
took up the matter, and in it the original question as 
to raising a continental revenue for American pur- 
poses was quite lost sight of. There is nothing to 
show that the king cared a straw for the revenue ; to 
snub and browbeat the Americans was all in all with 
him. 

There was a certain kind of vulgar shrewdness in 
thus selecting the Americans as chief antagonists, for 
should their resistance tend to become rebellious, it 
would tend to array public opinion in England against 
them as disturbers of the peace, and would thus dis- 
credit the principle which they represented. Thus 
did this mischief-maker on the throne go to work to 
stir up bad feelings between two great branches of the 
English race. 

Thus after 1766 the story of the causes of the 
American Revolution enters upon a new stage. In 
the earlier or Grenville stage a great public question 
was discussed on grounds of statesmanship, and the 
British government, having tried an impracticable 
solution, promptly withdrew it. No war need come 



OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY l8l 

from that situation. But in the second stage we 
see a desperate political schemer, to the neglect of 
public interests and in defiance of all sound statesman- 
ship, pushing on a needless quarrel until it inevitably 
ends in war. This second stage we may call the 
Townshend-North stage. 

It was a curious fortune that provided George III. 
with two such advisers as Charles Townshend and 
Frederick North. Both were brilliant and frivolous 
young men without much political principle ; both 
were inclined to take public life as an excellent joke. 
North lived long enough to find it no joke; Town- 
shend stayed upon the scene till he had perpetrated 
one colossal piece of mischief, and then died, leaving 
North to take the consequences. I do not believe 
Lord North would ever have originated such a meas- 
ure as the Revenue Act of 1767; there was no malice 
in his nature, but in Townshend there was a strong 
vein of utterly reckless diablerie. Nobody could have 
been more willing to please the king by picking a 
quarrel with the Americans, and nobody knew better 
how to do it. Townshend was exceptionally well 
informed on American affairs, and sinned with his 
eyes wide open. In his case it will not do to talk 
about the blundering of the British ministers. Gren- 
ville had blundered, but Townshend's ingenuity was 
devoted to brushing every American hair the wrong 
way. 

In the debates on the repeal of the Stamp Act the 
Americans had been charged with inconsistency in 
having allowed Parliament to tax them by means of 
port duties, while they refused to allow it to tax them 
by means of stamped paper. In reply the friends of 



1 82 THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE 

America had drawn a distinction between external 
and internal taxes, and had said that the Americans 
did not deny Parliament's right to tax them in the 
former case, but only in the latter case. The distinc- 
tion was more ingenious than sound, and indeed the 
Americans had been guilty of inconsistency. They 
had at first tacitly assented to port duties because the 
nature of an indirect tax is not so quickly and dis- 
tinctly realized as that of a direct tax, and so they 
had only gradually com.e to take in the full situation. 
But the acquiescence in port duties had been by no 
means unqualified. During all the reign of Charles II. 
the New England colonies had virtually defied the 
custom-house ; in later times the activity of smugglers 
had reduced all tariff acts to a dead letter; and so 
lately as 1761 the resistance to general search war- 
rants showed what might be expected when any rash 
ministry should endeavour to enforce such tariff acts. 
In short, it was perfectly clear that if pushed to a 
logical statement of their position, the Americans 
would deny the authority of Parliament from begin- 
ning to end. No one understood this better than 
Townshend when he now proceeded to lay a duty 
upon certain dried fruits, glass, painter's colours, paper, 
and tea. 

With this continental revenue he proposed, of course, 
to keep up a small army for defending the frontier; 
but he also proposed other things. For more than 
half a century the various royal governors had tried to 
persuade the legislatures to vote them fixed salaries, 
but the legislatures, unwilling to give them too loose 
a tether, had obstinately refused to do more than make 
an annual grant which expired unless renewed by a 



OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY 183 

fresh grant. This was still one of the burning ques- 
tions of American poHtics, and Tovvnshend now pro- 
posed to settle it offhand by taking it out of the hands 
of the legislatures once for all. Henceforth the 
governors should be paid by the crown out of the 
revenues collected in America, and as if this were not 
enough, the judges should be paid in the same way. 
If after these expenses there should be any surplus 
remaining, it would be used for pensioning eminent 
American officials. In plain English it would be used 
as a corruption fund. Thus the British ministry 
assumed direct control over the internal administration 
of the American colonies, including even the courts of 
justice ; under these circumstances it undertook to 
maintain an army, which might be employed against 
the people as readily as against Indians ; and it actually 
had the impudence to demand of the Americans the 
money to support it in doing these things ! To 
all this, said Townshend, with an evil twinkle in his 
eye, you Americans can't object, you know, for your 
friends say you are willing to submit to port duties. 
Then by way of an extra good sting he added a clause 
prohibiting the New York legislature from assembling 
for business of any sort until it should be prepared to 
yield to the British ministry in a measure for quar- 
tering troops that was intensely unpopular in New 
York. 

In this way did Townshend gather into a single 
parcel all the obnoxious things he could think of, and 
hurl them at the heads of the Americans in this so- 
called Revenue Act. His own feeling about it was 
betrayed in his laughing remark as he went down 
with it to the House of Commons, " I suppose I 



1 84 THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE 

shall be dismissed for my pains ! " Doubtless he never 
could have got it through t?ie House without the aid 
of the rotten boroughs, and his victory was one of the 
first evil symptoms of the growing power of what we 
may call the royal machine. No doubt Townshend 
looked forward to some fine sport when once the king 
and the Americans were set by the ears ; but he had 
no sooner carried his measures than sudden death 
removed him from the scene, and Lord North took his 
place. 

There never existed a self-respecting people that 
would not have resented and resisted such an outra- 
geous measure as this pretended Revenue Act. Yet 
there was not much disturbance of the peace in Amer- 
ica. All the ordinary machinery of argument and peti- 
tion was used to no purpose. The measure of resistance 
in which all the colonies united in 1 768 was an agree- 
ment to cease all commercial intercourse with Great 
Britain until the Revenue Act should be repealed. 
This agreement was to some extent evaded by traders 
more intent upon private gain than public policy, but 
on the whole it was remarkably well kept until the war 
came. Doubtless it seriously damaged and weakened 
the colonies, but it seemed the only kind of peaceful 
resistance that could be made. 

Smuggling of course went on, and the seizure of 
one of John Hancock's ships for a false entry caused 
a riot in Boston in which one of the collector's boats 
was burned. This affair led the king to the dangerous 
step of sending troops to Boston, and the sacking of 
Hutchinson's house three years before was quoted to 
silence those members of Parliament who opposed this 
step. The troops stayed in Boston seventeen months, 



OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY 185 

and all that time their mere presence there was in 
ofross violation of an act of Parliament. Our modern 
Tories, who hold up their hands in pious horror at 
every infraction of British-made law on the part of 
our forefathers, seem quite oblivious of the fact that 
according to British law these soldiers were mere 
trespassers in Boston. Their only legal abode was 
the Castle, on a small island in the harbour. They 
were kept in town under pretext of preserving order, 
but really to aid in enforcing the Revenue Act. That 
after seventeen months a slight scrimmage should have 
occurred, with the loss of half a dozen lives, was rather 
less than might have been expected. Next day the 
town-meeting ordered Hutchinson, who was then lieu- 
tenant-governor acting as governor, to remove all sol- 
diery to the Castle, and Hutchinson promptly obeyed ; 
he knew perfectly well that the law was on the side 
of the townspeople. I can imagine how that great 
Tory lawyer would have smiled at modern accounts 
of the King Street affray, in which a crowd of ruffians 
are depicted as wantonly assaulting the military guar- 
dians of law and order. Undoubtedly it was an affair 
of a mob ; but it was such a scrimmage as indicated 
no special criminality on the part of either soldiers or 
citizens, and thus was a very different sort of thing 
from the wicked destruction of Hutchinson's house. 
I may add that the perfectly calm and honourable 
way in which the affair was handled by the courts is 
a sufficient comment upon the ludicrous notion that 
Boston was a disorderly town requiring an armed 
soldiery to keep the peace. 

The sacking of Hutchinson's house, I say, and the 
chance affray on King Street were both cases of 



l86 THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE 

mob law, yet it is only very loose thinking that would 
attempt to liken one case to the other. Our fore- 
fathers knew the difference: the Hutchinson male- 
factors they cast into jail, but the memory of the 
King Street victims they kept green for many a year 
by an annual oration in the Old South Meeting 
House, on the baleful effects of quartering soldiers 
among peaceful citizens in time of peace. We are 
now ready to consider the Tea Party, which by no 
stretch of definition can properly be included among 
cases of mob law. We are at length prepared to see 
just what the Tea Party was. 

Early in 1770 Lord North made up his mind that 
the Revenue Act could not be enforced, and was a 
source of needless irritation, and he proposed to repeal 
it. But a full repeal would put things back where 
they were after the repeal of the Stamp Act, and even 
worse, for it would be a second victory for the Amer- 
icans. The king could not afford to put such a 
weapon into the hands of the New Whigs ; so it was 
decided to retain the duty on tea alone. In Parlia- 
ment, certain Whigs objected that it would avail 
nothing to repeal the other duties, if that on tea were 
kept, since it was not revenue but principle that was 
at stake. Bless their simple hearts, the king knew 
all about that, and he kept the duty on tea, simply in 
order to force another fight on the question of prin- 
ciple. It was a question on which he was growing 
more and more fanatical, and nothing could prevail 
upon him to let it alone. 

So for the next three years tea was the symbol 
with which the hostile spirits conjured. It stood for 
everything that true freemen loathe. In the deadly 



OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY 1 87 

tea-chest lurked the complete surrender of self-gov- 
ernment, the payment of governors and judges by the 
crown, the arbitrary suppression of legislatures, the 
denial of the principle that freemen can be taxed 
only by their own representatives. So long as they 
were threatened with tea, the colonists would not 
break the non-intercourse agreement. Once the mer- 
chants of New York undertook to order from Eng- 
land various other articles than tea, and the news 
was greeted all over the country with such fury that 
nothing more of the sort was attempted openly. As 
for tea itself shipped from England, one would as soon 
have thought of trying to introduce the Black Death. 

In the summer of 1772 the king tried to enforce 
the order that judges' salaries should be paid from 
the royal treasury. He was g-etting no revenue from 
America, but he would pay them out of the British 
revenues. He began with Massachusetts, and at 
once there was fierce excitement, which reverberated 
through all the colonies. The judges were forbidden 
under penalty of impeachment to touch the king's 
money, and so another year passed by and left 
George HI. still baffled. 

It was then that he hit upon his famous device for 
"trying the question" with America. This "trying 
the question " was his own phrase. It was observed 
that the Americans had more or less of tea to drink, 
though not an ounce was brought from England; 
whenever they solaced their nerves with the belliger- 
ent beverage, they smuggled it from Holland or the 
Dutch East Indies. The king, therefore, neatly 
arranged matters with the East India Company, so 
that it could afford to offer tea in American ports at 



1 88 THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE 

a price far below its market value; this tea, with the 
duty upon it, would cost American customers less 
than the tea smuggled from Holland, and in this way 
the Americans were to be ensnared into surrendering 
the great principle at issue. 

Under these circumstances the sending of the East 
India Company's tea-ships to America was in no sense 
an incident of commerce. The king's arrangement 
with the Company deprived it of its commercial char- 
acter. It was simply a political challenge. As Lord 
North openly confessed in the House of Commons, 
it was merely the king's method of " trying the ques- 
tion " with America. It was, moreover, an extremely 
insulting challenge. A grosser insult to any self-re- 
specting people can hardly be imagined. It was King 
George's way of asking that perennial Boss Tweed 
question, " What are you going to do about it ? " It 
was the most far-reaching political question that was 
raised in that age, for it involved the whole case of the 
relations of an imperial government to its colonies ; a 
solemn question to be settled not by mobs, but by the 
sober and deliberate sense of the American people, 
and it was thus that it was settled in Boston once and 
forever. 

/ Circumstances made Boston the battle-ground, and 
gave added point and concentrated meaning to every- 
thing that was done there. The royal challenge was 
aimed at the colonies as a whole, and ships were sent 
to New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, as well as 
to Boston. In all four towns consignees were ap- 
pointed to receive the tea and dispose of it after pay- 
ing the duty. But in the three former towns the 
consignees quailed before the wrath of the people, 



OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY 1 89 

resigned their commissions, and took oath that they 
would not act in the matter. So when the tea-ships 
at length arrived at New York and Philadelphia, they 
were turned about and sent home without ever cominsf 
within the jurisdiction of the custom-house. At Charles- 
ton the ships lingered more than the legal term of 
twenty days in port, and then the collector seized the 
tea and brought it ashore ; but as there was no con- 
signee at hand to pay the duty, the fragrant leaves lay 
untouched in the custom-house until they rotted and 
fell to pieces. But before these things happened, the bat- 
tle had been fought in Boston. There the consignees, 
two of whom were sons of Governor Hutchinson, re- 
fused to resign ; on no account, therefore, would it do 
to let the tea come ashore at Boston, for if it did, the 
duty would instantly be paid. The governor was a man 
of intense legality ; he did not approve the sending of 
the tea, but if a ship once came into port, it must not, 
in his opinion, go out again without discharging all 
due formalities. His sons were like him for stubborn 
courage, and thus it was that Boston became the seat 
of war. With those two redoubtable Puritans, Thomas 
Hutchinson and Samuel Adams, pitted against each 
other, it was a meeting of Greek with Greek, and one 
might be sure that something dramatic and incisive 
would come of it. 

In those stormy days the governor so often turned 
his legislature out of doors that it may be said to have 
been in a chronic state of dissolution. In order to 
transact public business on a large scale, the town- 
meetings appointed committees of correspondence, 
whereby town might confer with town and the sense 
of the whole commonwealth be thus ascertained. This 



I90 THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE 

* 

system, set in operation by Samuel Adams in 1772, 
was one of the strongest among the organizing forces 
that brought into existence the Federal Union. But 
my point now is that the action of these committees of 
correspondence expressed the deliberate sense of the 
commonwealth as truly as any act of legislature could 
have expressed it. 

There is something eloquent and touching in the 
stained and yellow records of those old town-meetings. 
When it was known that the ships were coming, Bos- 
ton asked advice of all the other towns. " Brethren, 
we are reduced to this dilemma, either to sit down 
quiet under this and every other burden that our ene- 
mies shall see fit to lay upon us, or to rise up and re- 
sist this and every plan laid for our destruction, as 
becomes wise freemen. In this extremity we earnestly 
request your advice." 

Some of the replies from the mountain villages are 
worth recording. The farmers of Lenox said, " As we 
are in a remote wilderness corner of the earth, we 
know but little ; but neither nature nor the God of 
nature requireth us to crouch, Issachar-like, between 
the two burdens of poverty and slavery." The farm- 
ers of Petersham were concerned to think of the risk 
that Boston was assuming, exposed as she was to the 
fire of a British fleet. " The time may come," they 
said, " when you may be driven from your goodly heri- 
tage; if that should be the case, we invite you to 
share with us in our small supplies of the necessaries 
of life, and should we still not be able to withstand, 
we are determined to retire and seek repose amongst 
the inland aboriginal natives, with whom we doubt 
not but to find more humanity and brotherly love than 



OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY 



IQI 



we have lately received from our mother country." 
The Boston committee replied, " We join with the 
town of Petersham in preferring a life among savages 
to the most splendid condition of slavery ; but Heaven 
will bless the united efforts of a brave people." 

From every town in Massachusetts came instruc- 
tions that on no account whatever must the tea be 
allowed to come ashore. Similar advice came in from 
the other colonies. The action of the Boston con- 
signees in refusing to resign had fixed the eyes of the 
whole country upon that town. It was rightly felt 
that the weal or woe of America depended upon the 
action of the people there. If through any weakness 
of Boston a single ounce of tea should be landed, 
there was a widespread feeling that the chief bond of 
union between the colonies would be snapped. Hence 
the cordial letter from Philadelphia said : " Our only 
fear is that you may shrink. May God give you vir- 
tue enough to save the liberties of your country." 
The advice that thus came from all quarters was abso- 
lutely unanimous. When the tea-ships arrived late in 
November in Boston harbour, they were taken in charge 
by the committees of Boston, Cambridge, Charles- 
town, Roxbury, and Dorchester, and a military guard 
was placed over them. From that time forth until the 
end not a step was taken save under the direction of 
these five committees, to whose action a consistent 
unity was given by the prudent leadership of Samuel 
Adams, while in all that they did they felt that in the 
sight of the whole country they were discharging a 
sacred duty. Truly for an instance of mob law this 
Tea Party was somewhat conscientiously and prayer- 
fully prepared ! 



192 THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE 

There were just twenty days in which to try all 
legal measures for sending away the ships without 
landing the tea, but legal measures failed because one 
side was as stubborn as the other. After the ships 
had once come above the Castle, they could not go out 
again without the regular clearance from the collector 
of the port, or else a special pass from the governor. 
But the collector manoeuvred and wore away the time 
without granting a clearance. For nineteen days and 
nights the people's guard patrolled the wharves, senti- 
nels watched from the church belfries, the tar barrels 
on Beacon Hill were kept ready for lighting, and 
any attempt at landing the tea forcibly would have 
been met by an instant uprising of the neighbouring 
counties. So things went till Thursday, December i6, 
the last of the twenty days. The morning was a 
drizzling rain, but in the afternoon it cleared off bright 
and crisp and frosty, while all day in the Old South 
Church a town-meeting was busy with momentous 
issues. After midnight nothing but a personal assault 
could prevent the collector from seizing the tea and 
bringing it ashore, and nothing but personal violence 
could prevent one or both the young Hutchinsons 
from paying the duty. There was but one peaceful 
avenue of escape from the situation. The governor 
could grant a pass which would enable the ships to go 
out without a clearance. Would he do so ? Samuel 
Adams knew him too well to expect it. Francis 
Rotch, the owner of the principal ship, was sent out to 
the governor's country house on Milton Hill, to ask 
for a pass. While his return was awaited a gentleman 
highly esteemed, already wasted with the disease that 
was soon to end his days, addressed the assembly. 



OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY 1 93 

He reminded them of the probable consequences of 
what might be done that day — nothing less than war 
against the whole power of Great Britain — and 
begged them to act with such consequences fully in 
view. After this touching word of caution from 
Josiah Quincy, a final vote was taken. Suppose the 
governor should refuse, might the tea on any account 
whatever be suffered to land ? One cannot step into 
the venerable church to-day without hearing its rafters 
ring with that sturdy unanimous " No ! " How the 
vote was to be carried into effect few people knew, but 
Samuel Adams knew, and so did Dr. Joseph Warren 
and others who had counselled together in a back 
room in Edes and Gill's printing-ofifice on the corner 
of Court and Brattle streets. There was a Boston 
merchant who evidently knew what was intended. It 
had grown dark and the great church was dimly 
lighted with candles when this gentleman got up and 
asked, " Mr. Moderator, did any one ever think how 
tea would mix with salt water ? " and there was a 
shout of applause. At length the governor's refusal 
came, and never did such silence settle down over an 
assembly as when Adams arose and exclaimed, " This 
meeting can do nothing more to save the country ! " 
The response to this solemn watchword was the war- 
whoop from outside, and those strange Indian figures 
passing by in the moonlight. Was there ever such a 
riot as that which followed, when those thronging 
thousands upon the wharves stood with bated breath, 
while the busy click of hatchets came from the ships 
and from moment to moment a broken chest was 
hoisted upon the bulwark and its fragrant contents 
emptied into the icy waters .f* Things happened there, 



194 THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE 

the like of which, I dare say, were never recorded in 
the history of riots. So punctilious were those Ind- 
ians that when one of them by accident broke a pad- 
lock belonging to one of the ship's officers, he bought 
a new padlock the next morning and made good the 
loss. 

Who were these Indians ? Admiral Montagu and 
other British gentlemen, who with him beheld the pro- 
ceedings, saw fit to declare that they " were not a dis- 
orderly rabble, but men of sense, coolness, and 
intrepidity." Paul Revere was among them, and, in 
all probability. Dr. Warren was one. George Robert 
Twelves Hawes, one of the last survivors, died in 
1835, at the age of ninety-eight. He used to tell how, 
while he was busily ripping open a chest, the man 
next to him raised his hatchet so high that the Indian 
blanket fell away from his arm and disclosed the well- 
known crimson velvet sleeve and point-lace ruffles of 
John Hancock ! 

Can anybody really discover in these proceedings 
anything that justifies a comparison with the furious 
pro-slavery mob that threatened Garrison's life ? The 
writer who made that strange comparison seems to 
have been thinking of the fact that, in both cases, 
well-dressed persons were concerned. I suppose 
Hancock's velvet sleeve may be responsible for the 
droll analogy. It seems to me eminently fitting that 
the hand which subscribed so handsomely the Decla- 
ration of Independence should have taken part in the 
decisive defiance that brought on the war. We are 
told that the destruction of the tea was " illegal " ; so 
was the Declaration of Independence. Each rested 
upon the paramount right of self-preservation, and the 



OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY 195 

former was no more the act of a mob than the latter. 
It was the deUberate and coolly reasoned act of the 
people of Massachusetts, cordially approved and 
stoutly defended by the people of the thirteen colo- 
nies. The contemporary British historian Gordon 
saw clearly that the crisis was one in which no com- 
promise was possible, and the only alternative, the 
surrender of Boston, would have imperilled the whole 
future of America. As Dr. Ramsay said, you could 
not condemn the Tea Party without condemning the 
Revolution altogether, for in no other way could the 
men of Boston discharge the duty which they owed 
to the country. But a more fitting comment will 
never be uttered than that of the enthusiastic John 
Adams, the day after the event: "This is the most 
magnificent movement of all. There is a dignity, a 
majesty, a sublimity, in this last effort of the patriots, 
that I greatly admire. . . . This destruction of the 
tea . . . must have so important consequences and so 
lasting, that I cannot but consider it an epoch in 
history." 

Yes, this is the true judgment. If there is any- 
thing in human life that is dignified and grand, it is 
the self-restraint of masses of men under extreme 
provocation, and the steady guidance of their actions 
by the light of sober reason ; and from this point of 
view the Boston Tea Party will always remain a typi- 
cal instance of what is majestic and sublime. 



VI 
REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 



VI 

REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 

The recent publication of an admirable memoir of 
Huxley, by his son Leonard,^ has awakened in me old 
memories of some of the pleasantest scenes I have 
ever known. The book is written in a spirit of charm- 
ing frankness, and is thickly crowded with details not 
one of which could well be spared. A notable feature 
is the copiousness of the extracts from familiar letters, 
in which everything is faithfully reproduced, even to 
the genial nonsense that abounds, or the big, big D 
that sometimes, though rarely, adds its pungent flavour. 
Huxley was above all things a man absolutely simple 
and natural ; he never posed, was never starched, or 
prim, or on his good behaviour ; and he was nothing if 
not playful. A biography that brings him before us, 
robust and lifelike on every page, as this book does, is 
surely a model biography. A brief article, like the 
present, cannot even attempt to do justice to it, but I 
am moved to jot down some of the reminiscences and 
reflections which it has awakened. 

My first introduction to the fact of Huxley's exist- 
ence was in February, 1861, when I was a sophomore 
at Harvard. The second serial number of Herbert 
Spencer's " First Principles," which had just arrived 
from London, and on which I was feasting my soul, 

^ " Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley." By his son, Leonard 
Huxley. In two volumes. New York : D. Appleton & Co., 1900. 

199 



200 REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 

contained an interesting reference to Huxley's views 
concerning a "pre-geologic past of unknown dura- 
tion." In the next serial number a footnote informed 
the reader that the phrase " persistence of force," since 
become so famous, was suggested by Huxley, as avoid- 
ing an objection which Spencer had raised to the 
current expression "conservation of force." Further 
references to Huxley, as also to Tyndall, in the course 
of the book, left me with a vague conception of the 
three friends as, after a certain fashion, partners in the 
business of scientific research and generalization. 

Some such vague conception was developed in the 
mind of the general public into divers droll miscon- 
ceptions. Even as Spencer's famous phrase, " survi- 
val of the fittest," which he suggested as preferable 
to " natural selection," is by many people ascribed to 
Darwin, so we used to hear wrathful allusions to 
" Huxley's Belfast Address," and similar absurdities. 
The climax was reached in 1876, when Huxley and 
his wife made a short visit to the United States. 
Early in that year Tyndall had married a daughter of 
Lord Claud Hamilton, brother of the Duke of Aber- 
corn, and one fine morning in August we were gravely 
informed by the newspapers that " Huxley and his 
titled bride " had just arrived in New York. For our 
visitors, who had left at home in London seven goodly 
children, some of them approaching maturity, this item 
of news was a source of much merriment. 

To return to my story, it was not long before my 
notion of Huxley came to be that of a very sharply 
defined and powerful individuality; for such he ap- 
peared in his " Lectures on the Origin of Species " and 
in his " Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature," both 



REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 20 1 

published in 1863. Not long afterward, in reading 
the lay sermon on " The Advisableness of Improving 
Natural Knowledge," I felt that here was a poetic soul 
whom one could not help loving. In those days I fell 
in with Youmans, who had come back from England 
bubbling and brimming over with racy anecdotes 
about the philosophers and men of science. Of course 
the Soapy Sam incident was not forgotten, and You- 
mans' version of it, which was purely from hearsay, 
could make no pretension to verbal accuracy ; never- 
theless it may be worth citing. Mr. Leonard Huxley 
has carefully compared several versions from eye and 
ear witnesses, together with his father's own com- 
ments, and I do not know where one could find a more 
■striking illustration of the difficulty of attaining absolute 
accuracy in writing even contemporary history. 

As I heard the anecdote from Youmans : It was at 
the meeting of the British Association at Oxford in 
i860, soon after the publication of Darwin's epoch- 
making book, and while people in general were wag- 
ging their heads at it, that the subject came up for 
discussion before a fashionable and hostile audience. 
Samuel Wilberforce, the plausible and self-complacent 
Bishop of Oxford, commonly known as " Soapy Sam," 
launched out in a rash speech, conspicuous for its 
ignorant misstatements, and highly seasoned with ap- 
peals to the prejudices of the audience, upon whose 
lack of intelligence the speaker relied. Near him sat 
Huxley, already eminent as a man of science, and 
known to look favourably upon Darwinism, but more 
or less youthful withal, only five-and-thirty, so that the 
bishop anticipated sport in badgering him. At the 
close of his speech he suddenly turned upon Huxley 



202 REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 

and begged to be informed if the learned gentleman 
was really willing to be regarded as the descendant of 
a monkey. Eager self-confidence had blinded the 
bishop to the tactical blunder in thus coarsely inviting 
a retort. Huxley was instantly upon his feet with a 
speech demolishing the bishop's card house of mis- 
takes; and at the close he observed that since a 
question of personal preferences had been very im- 
properly brought into the discussion of a scientific 
theory, he felt free to confess that if the alternatives 
were descent, on the one hand, from a respectable 
monkey, or on the other from a bishop of the English 
Church who could stoop to such misrepresentations 
and sophisms as the audience had lately listened to, he 
should declare in favour of the monkey ! 

Now this was surely not what Huxley said, nor how 
he said it. His own account is that, at Soapy Sam's 
insolent taunt, he simply whispered to his neighbour. 
Sir Benjamin Brodie, "The Lord hath delivered him into 
my hands ! " a remark which that excellent old gentle- 
man received with a stolid stare. Huxley sat quiet un- 
til the chairman called him up. His concluding retort 
seems to have been most carefully reported by John 
Richard Green, then a student at Oxford, in a letter to 
his friend, Boyd Dawkins : " I asserted — and I repeat 

— that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having 
an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor 
whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather 
be a man — a man of restless and versatile intellect 

— who, not content with an equivocal success in his 
own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions 
with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure 
them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention 



REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 203 

of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent 
digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice." 
This can hardly be accurate ; no electric effect could 
have been wrought by so long-winded a sentiment. I 
agree with a writer in Macmillans Magazine that this 
version is " much too Green," but it doubtless gives 
the purport of what Huxley probably said in half as 
many but far more picturesque and fitting words. I 
have a feeling that the electric effect is best preserved 
in the Youmans version, in spite of its manifest verbal 
inaccuracy. It is curious to read that in the ensuing 
buzz of excitement a lady fainted, and had to be car- 
ried from the room ; but the audience were in general 
quite alive to the bishop's blunder in manners and tac- 
tics, and, with the genuine English love of fair play, 
they loudly applauded Huxley. From that time forth 
it was recognized that he was not the sort of man to be 
browbeaten. As for Bishop Wilberforce, he carried 
with him from the affray no bitterness, but was always 
afterward most courteous to his castigator. 

When Huxley had his scrimmage with Congreve, in 
1869, over the scientific aspects of Positivism, I was 
giving lectures to postgraduate classes at Harvard on 
the Positive Philosophy. I never had any liking for 
Comte or his ideas, but entertained an absurd notion 
that the epithet " Positive " was a proper and conven- 
ient one to apply to scientific methods and scientific 
philosophy in general. In the course of the discussion 
I attacked sundry statements of Huxley with quite un- 
necessary warmth, for such is the superfluous belliger- 
ency of youth. The World reported my lectures in 
full, insomuch that each one filled six or seven columns, 
and the editor, Manton Marble, sent copies regularly 



204 REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 

to Huxley and others. Four years afterward I went 
to London, to spend some time there in finishing 
" Cosmic Philosophy " and getting it through the 
press. I had corresponded with Spencer for several 
years, and soon after my arrival he gave one of his 
exquisite little dinners at his own lodgings. Spen- 
cer's omniscience extended to the kitchen, and as 
composer of a menu neither Careme nor Francatelli 
could have surpassed him. The other guests were 
Huxley, Tyndall, Lewes, and Hughlings Jackson. 
Huxley took but little notice of me, and I fancied that 
something in those lectures must have offended him. 
But two or three weeks later Spencer took me to the 
dinner at the X Club, all the members of which were 
present except Lubbock. When the coffee was served 
Huxley brought his chair around to my side, and 
talked with me the rest of the evening. My impression 
was that he was the cosiest man I had ever met. He 
ended by inviting me to his house for the next Sunday 
at six, for what he called " tall tea." 

This was the introduction to a series of experiences 
so delightful that, if one could only repeat them, the 
living over again all the bad quarters of an hour in 
one's lifetime would not be too high a price to pay. 
I was already at home in several London households, 
but nowhere was anything so sweet as the cordial wel- 
come in that cosey drawing-room on Marlborough Place, 
where the great naturalist became simply " Pater " (pro- 
nounced Patter), to be pulled about and tousled and 
kissed by those lovely children ; nor could anything 
so warm the heart of an exile (if so melancholy a term 
can properly be applied to anybody sojourning in be- 
loved London) as to have the little seven-year-old miss 



REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 205 

climb into one's lap and ask for fairy tales, whereof I 
luckily had an ample repertoire. Nothing could be 
found more truly hospitable than the long dinner table, 
where our beaming host used to explain, " Because this 
is called a tea is no reason why a man shouldn't pledge 
his friend in a stoup of Rhenish, or even in a noggin of 
Glenlivet, if he has a mind to." At the end of our 
first evening I was told that a plate would be set for 
me every Sunday, and I must never fail to come. 
After two or three Sundays, however, I began to feel 
afraid of presuming too much upon the cordiality of 
these new friends, and so, by a superhuman effort of 
self-control, and at the cost of unspeakable wretched- 
ness, I stayed away. For this truancy I was promptly 
called to account, a shamefaced confession was ex- 
torted, and penalties, vague but dire, were denounced 
in case of a second offence ; so I never missed another 
Sunday evening till the time came for leaving London. 
Part of the evening used to be spent in the little 
overcrowded library, before a blazing fire, while we 
discussed all manner of themes, scientific or poetical, 
practical or philosophical, religious or aesthetic. Hux- 
ley, like a true epicure, smoked the sweet little brierwood 
pipe, but he seemed to take especial satisfaction in 
seeing me smoke very large full-flavoured Havanas from 
a box which some Yankee admirer had sent him. 
Whatever subject came uppermost in our talk, I was 
always impressed with the fulness and accuracy of his 
information and the keenness of his judgments ; but 
that is, of course, what any appreciative reader can 
gather from his writings. Unlike Spencer, he was an 
omnivorous reader. Of historical and literary know- 
ledge, such as one usually gets from books, Spencer 



2o6 REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 

had a great deal, and of an accurate and well-digested 
sort ; he had some incomprehensible way of absorbing 
it through the pores of the skin, — at least, he never 
seemed to read books. Huxley, on the other hand, 
seemed to read everything worth reading, — history, 
politics, metaphysics, poetry, novels, even books of 
science ; for perhaps it may not be superfluous to 
point out to the general world of readers that no great 
man of science owes his scientific knowledge to books. 
Huxley's colossal knowledge of the animal kingdom 
was not based upon the study of Cuvier, Baer, and 
other predecessors, but upon direct personal examina- 
tion of thousands of organisms, living and extinct. 
He cherished a wholesome contempt for mere book- 
ishness in matters of science, and carried on war to 
the knife against the stupid methods of education in 
vogue forty years ago, when students were expected 
to learn something of chemistry or palaeontology by 
reading about black oxide of manganese or the denti- 
tion of anoplotherium. A rash clergyman once, with- 
out further equipment in natural history than some 
desultory reading, attacked the Darwinian theory in 
some sundry magazine articles, in which he made him- 
self uncommonly merry at Huxley's expense. This 
was intended to draw the great man's fire; and as 
the batteries remained silent the author proceeded to 
write to Huxley, calling his attention to the articles, 
and at the same time, with mock modesty, asking ad- 
vice as to the further study of these deep questions. 
Huxley's answer was brief and to the point, " Take a 
cockroach and dissect it ! " 

Too exclusive devotion, however, to scalpel and 
microscope may leave a man of science narrow and 



REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 207 

one-sided, dead to some of the most interesting as- 
pects of human Hfe. But Huxley was keenly alive in 
all directions, and would have enjoyed mastering all 
branches of knowledge, if the days had only been long 
enouo^h. He found rest and recreation in change of 
themes, and after a long day's scientific work at South 
Kensington would read Sybel's " French Revolution," 
or Lange's " History of Materialism," or the last new 
novel, until the witching hour of midnight. This 
reading was in various languages. Without a uni- 
versity education, Huxley had a remarkably good 
knowledge of Latin. He was fond of Spinoza, and 
every once in a while, in the course of our chats, he 
would exclaim : " Come, now, let's see what old Bene- 
dict has to say about it ! There's no better man." 
Then he would take the book from its shelf, and 
while we both looked on the page he would give 
voice to his own comments in a broad and liberal 
paraphrase, that showed his sound and scholarlike ap- 
preciation of every point in the Latin text. A spirited 
and racy version it would have been, had he ever 
undertaken to translate Spinoza. So I remember 
saying once, but he replied, " We must leave it for 
young Fred Pollock, whom I think you have seen ; 
he is shy and doesn't say much, but I can tell 
you, whatever he does is sure to be amazingly 
good." They who are familiar with Sir Frederick 
Pollock's noble book on Spinoza, to say nothing 
of his other works, will recognize the truth of the 
prophecy. 

Huxley had also a mastery of French, Italian, and 
German, and perhaps of some other modern lan- 
guages. Angelo Heilprin says that he found him 



2oS REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 

studying Russian, chiefly in order to acquire a thor- 
ough famiUarity with the work of the great anatomist, 
Kovalevsky. How far he may have carried that study 
I know not ; but his son tells us that it was also in mid- 
dle life that he began Greek, in order to read, at first 
hand, Aristotle and the New Testament. To read 
Aristotle with critical discernment requires an ex- 
tremely good knowledge of Greek; and if Huxley 
got so far as that, we need not be surprised at hear- 
ing that he could enjoy the Homeric poems in the 
original. 

I suppose there were few topics in the heavens or 
on earth that did not get overhauled at that little 
library fireside. At one time it would be politics, 
and my friend would thank God that, whatever mis- 
takes he might have made in life, he had never bowed 
the knee to either of those intolerable humbugs, 
Louis Napoleon or Benjamin Disraeli. Without 
admitting that the shifty Jew deserved to be placed 
on quite so low a plane as Hortense Beauharnais's 
feeble son, we can easily see how distasteful he would 
be to a man of Huxley's earnest and whole-souled 
directness. But antipathy to Disraeli did not in this 
case mean fondness for Gladstone. In later years, 
when Huxley was having his great controversy with 
Gladstone, we find him writing : " Seriously, it is to 
me a great thing that the destinies of this country 
should at present be seriously influenced by a man 
who, whatever he may be in the affairs of which I am 
no judge, is nothing but a copious shuffler in those 
which I do understand." In 1873 there occurred a 
brief passage at arms between Gladstone and Herbert 
Spencer, in which the great statesman's intellect 



REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 



209 



looked amusingly small and commonplace in contrast 
with the giant mind of the philosopher. The defeated 
party was left with no resources except rhetorical arti- 
fice to cover his retreat, and his general aspect was 
foxy, not to say Jesuitical. At least so Huxley de- 
clared, and I thoroughly agreed with him. Yet 
surely it would be a very inadequate and unjust esti- 
mate of Gladstone, which should set him down as a 
shuffler, and there leave the matter. From the states- 
man's point of view it might be contended that Glad- 
stone was exceptionally direct and frank. But a 
statesman is seldom, if ever, called upon to ascertain 
and exhibit the fundamental facts of a case without 
bias and in the disinterested mood which Science de- 
mands of her votaries. The statesman's business is 
to accomplish sundry concrete political purposes, and 
he measures statements primarily, not by their truth, 
but by their availableness as means toward a practi- 
cal end. Pure science cultivates a widely different 
habit of mind. One could no more expect a prime 
minister, as such, to understand Huxley's attitude in 
presence of a scientific problem, than a deaf-mute to 
comprehend a symphony of Beethoven. Gladstone's 
aim was to score a point against his adversary, at 
whatever cost, whereas Huxley was as quick to detect 
his own mistakes as anybody else's ; and such differ- 
ences in temperament were scarcely compatible with 
mutual understanding. 

If absolute loyalty to truth, involving complete self- 
abnegation in face of the evidence, be the ideal aim of 
the scientific inquirer, there have been few men in 
whom that ideal has been so perfectly realized as in 
Huxley. If ever he were tempted by some fancied 

2P 



2IO REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 

charm of speculation to swerve a hair's breadth from 
the strict Hne of fact, the temptation was promptly- 
slaughtered and made no sign. For intellectual in- 
tegrity, he was a spotless Sir Galahad. I believe 
there was nothing in life which he dreaded so much, 
as the sin of allowing his reason to be hoodwinked by 
personal predilections, or whatever Francis Bacon 
would have called " idols of the cave." Closely con- 
nected with this ever present feeling was a holy hor- 
ror of ^ /rz"^r2 convictions of logical necessity, and of 
long festoons of deductive argument suspended from 
such airy supports. The prime necessity for him was 
to appeal at every step to observation and experiment, 
and in the absence of such verification, to rest content 
with saying, " I do not know." It is to Huxley, I 
believe, that we owe the epithet " Agnostic," for 
which all men of scientific proclivities owe him a debt 
of gratitude, since it happened to please the popular 
fancy and at once supplanted the label " Positivist " 
which used to be ruthlessly pasted upon all such men, 
in spite of their protests and struggles. No better 
word than " Agnostic " could be found to express 
Huxley's mental temperament, but with anything like 
a formulated system of agnosticism he had little more 
to do than with other " isms." He used to smile at 
the formidable parade which Lewes was making with 
his " Objective Method and Verification," in which cap- 
ital letters did duty for part of the argument; and 
as for Dean Mansel's elaborate agnosticism, in his 
" Limits of Religious Thought," Huxley, taking a hint 
from Hogarth, used to liken him to a (theological) inn- 
keeper who has climbed upon the sign-board of the 
rival (scientific) inn, and is busily sawing it off, quite 



REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 211 

oblivious of the grewsome fact that he is sitting upon 
the unsupported end ! But while he thus set little 
store by current agnostic metaphysics, Huxley's in- 
tellectual climate, if I may so speak, was one of per- 
fect agnosticism. In intimate converse with him, he 
always seemed to me a thoroughgoing and splendid 
representation of Hume ; indeed, in his writings he 
somewhere lets fall a remark expressing a higher re- 
gard for Hume than for Kant. It was at this point 
that we used to part company in our talks : so long 
as it was a question of Berkeley we were substantially 
agreed, but when it came to Hume we agreed to 
differ. 

It is this complete agnosticism of temperament, 
added to his abiding dread of intellectual dishonesty, 
that explains Huxley's attitude toward belief in a fu- 
ture life. He was not a materialist ; nobody saw more 
clearly than he the philosophic flimsiness of mate- 
rialism, and he looked with strong disapproval upon 
the self-complacent negations of Ludwig Buechner. 
Nevertheless, with regard to the belief in an immortal 
soul, his position was avowedly agnostic, with perhaps 
just the slightest possible tacit though reluctant lean- 
ing toward the negative. This slight bias was appar- 
ently due to two causes. First, it is practically beyond 
the power of science to adduce evidence in support of 
the soul's survival of the body, since the whole question 
lies beyond the bounds of our terrestrial experience. 
Huxley was the last man to assume that the possibili- 
ties of nature are limited by our experience, and I think 
he would have seen the force of the argument that, in 
questions where evidence is in the nature of the case 
inaccessible, our inability to produce it does not afford 



212 REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 

even the slightest prima facie ground for a negative 
verdict.^ Nevertheless, he seems to have felt as if the 
absence of evidence did afford some such priina facie 
ground ; for in a letter to Charles Kingsley, written in 
i860, soon after the sudden death of his first child, he 
says : " Had I lived a couple of centuries earlier, I 
could have fancied a devil scoffing at me . . . and ask- 
ing me what profit it was to have stripped myself of 
the hopes and consolations of the mass of mankind. 
To which my only reply was, and is, O devil ! truth is 
better than much profit. I have searched over the 
grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name 
and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other, 
as the penalty, still I will not lie." This striking 
declaration shows that the second cause of the bias 
was the dread of self-deception. It was a noble exhi- 
bition of intellectual honesty raised to a truly Puritanic 
fervour of self-abnegation. Just because life is sweet, 
and the love of it well-nigh irrepressible, must all such 
feelings be suspected as tempters, and frowned out of 
our temple of philosophy .? Rather than run any risk 
of accepting a belief because it is pleasant, let us incur 
whatever chance there may be of error in the opposite 
direction ; thus we shall at least avoid the one unpar- 
donable sin. Such, I think, was the shape which the 
case assumed in Huxley's mind. To me it takes a 
very different shape ; but I cannot help feeling that 
mankind is going to be helped by such stanch intel- 
lectual integrity as his far more than it is going to be 
helped by consoling doctrines of whatever sort; and 
therefore his noble self-abnegation, even though it may 

1 I have explained this point at some length in the *• Unseen World," 
PP- 43-53- 



REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 213 

have been greater than was called for, is worthy of 
most profound and solemn homage. 

But we did not spend the whole of the evening in 
the little library. Brierwood and Havana at length 
gave out, and the drawing-room had its claims upon us. 
There was a fondness for music in the family, and it 
was no unusual thing for us to gather around the piano 
and sing psalms, after which there would perhaps be a 
Beethoven sonata, or one of Chopin's nocturnes, or 
perhaps a song. I can never forget the rich contralto 
voice of one bright and charming daughter, since 
passed away, or the refrain of an old-fashioned song 
which she sometimes sang about " My love, that loved 
me long ago. " From music it was an easy transition 
to scraps of Browning or Goethe, leading to various 
disquisition. Of mirth and badinage there was always 
plenty. I dare say there was not another room in 
London where so much exuberant nonsense might have 
been heard. It is no uncommon thing for masters of 
the Queen's English to delight in torturing it, and 
Huxley enjoyed that sort of pastime as much as James 
Russell Lowell. " Smole " and " declone " were speci- 
mens of the preterites that used to fall from his lips ; 
and as for puns, the air was blue with them. I cannot 
recall one of them now, but the following example, 
from a letter of 1855 inviting Hooker to his wedding, 
will suffice to show the quality : " I terminate my 
Baccalaureate and take my degree of M. A. trimony 
(isn't that atrocious?) on Saturday, July 21." 

One evening the conversation happened to touch 
upon the memorable murder of Dr. Parkman by Dr. 
Webster, and I expressed some surprise that an expert 
chemist, like Webster, should have been so slow in 



214 REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 

getting his victim's remains out of the way. " Well," 
quoth Huxley, "there's a good deal of substance in a 
human body. It isn't easy to dispose of so much 
corpus delicti, — a reflection which has frequently 
deterred me when on the point of killing somebody." 
At such remarks a soft ripple of laughter would run 
about the room, with murmurs of "Oh, Pater!" It 
was just the same in his lectures to his students. In 
the simple old experiment illustrating reflex action, a 
frog, whose brain had been removed, was touched upon 
the right side of the back with a slightly irritating acid, 
and would forthwith reach up with his right hind leg 
and rub the place. The next thing in order was to tie 
the right leg, whereupon the left leg would come up, 
and by dint of strenuous effort reach the itching spot. 
One day the stretching was so violent as to result in 
a particularly elaborate and comical somersault on the 
part of the frog, whereupon Huxley exclaimed, " You 
see, it doesn't require much of a brain to be an acrobat ! " 
In an examination on anatomy a very callow lad got 
the valves of the heart wrong, putting the mitral on 
the right side; but Huxley took compassion on him, 
with the remark, " Poor little beggar ! I never got 
them correctly myself until I reflected that a bishop 
was never in the right ! " On another occasion, at the 
end of a lecture, he asked one of the students if he 
understood it all. The student replied, " All, sir, but 
one part, during which you stood between me and the 
blackboard." "Ah," rejoined Huxley, " I did my best 
to make myself clear, but could not make myself 
transparent ! " ^ 

1 I have here eked out my own reminiscences by instances cited from 
Leonard Huxley's book. 



REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 215 

Probably the most tedious bore on earth is the man 
who feels it incumbent on him always to be facetious 
and to turn everything into a joke. Lynch law is 
about the right sort of thing for such persons. Hux- 
ley had nothing in common with them. His drollery 
was the spontaneous bubbling over of the seething 
fountains of energy. The world's strongest spirits, 
from Shakespeare down, have been noted for playful- 
ness. The prim and sober creatures who know neither 
how to poke fun nor to take it are apt to be the per- 
sons who are ridden by their work, — useful mortals 
after their fashion, mayhap, but not interesting or stimu- 
lating. Huxley's playfulness lightened the burden of 
life for himself and for all with whom he came in con- 
tact. I seem to see him now, looking up from his end 
of the table, — for my place was usually at Mrs. Hux- 
ley's end, — his dark eyes kindling under their shaggy 
brows, and a smile of indescribable beauty spreading 
over the swarthy face, as prelude to some keen and 
pithy but never unkind remark. Electric in energy, 
formidable in his incisiveness, he smote hard ; but there 
was nothing cruel about him, nor did he ever inflict 
pain through heedless remarks. That would have been 
a stupidity of which he was incapable. His quickness 
and sureness of perception, joined with his abounding 
kindliness, made him a man of almost infinite tact. 
I had not known him long before I felt that the ruling 
characteristic in his nature was teiiderness. He re- 
minded me of one of Charles Reade's heroes. Colonel 
Dujardin, who had the eye of a hawk, but down some- 
where in the depths of that eye of a hawk there was 
the eye of a dove. It was chiefly the sympathetic 
quality in the man that exerted upon me an ever 



2i6 REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 

strengthening spell. My experiences in visiting him 
had one notable feature, which I found it hard to inter- 
pret. After leaving the house, at the close of a Sun- 
day evening, the outside world used to seem cold and 
lonely for being cut off from that presence ; yet on the 
next Sunday, at the moment of his cordial greeting, a 
feeling always came over me that up to that moment I 
had never fully taken in how lovable he was, I had 
never quite done him justice. In other words, no mat- 
ter how vivid the image which I carried about in 
my mind, it instantly seemed dim and poor in presence 
of the reality. Such feelings are known to lovers; 
in other relations of life they are surely unusual. I 
was speaking about this to my dear old friend, the late 
Alexander Macmillan, when he suddenly exclaimed: 
" You may well feel so, my boy. I tell you, there is so 
much real Christianity in Huxley that if it were par- 
celled out among all the men, women, and children in 
the British Islands, there would be enough to save the 
soul of every one of them, and plenty to spare ! " 

I have said that Huxley was never unkind ; it is 
perhaps hardly necessary to tell his readers that he 
could be sharp and severe, if the occasion required. I 
have heard his wife say that he never would allow 
himself to be preyed upon by bores, and knew well 
how to get rid of them. Some years after the time of 
which I have been writing, I dined one evening at the 
Savile Club with Huxley, Spencer, and James Sime. 
As we were chatting over our coffee, some person 
unknown to us came in and sat down on a sofa near 
by. Presently, this man, becoming interested in the 
conversation, cut short one of our party, and addressed 
a silly remark to Spencer in reply to something which 



REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 



217 



he had been saying. Spencer's answer was civil, but 
brief, and not inviting. Nothing abashed, the stranger 
kept on, and persisted in forcing himself into the con- 
versation, despite our bleak frowns and arctic glances. 
It was plain that something must be done, and while 
the intruder was aiming a question directly at Huxley, 
the latter turned his back upon him. This was intel- 
ligible even to asinine apprehension, and the re- 
mainder of our evening was unmolested. 

I never knew (not being inquisitive) just when the 
Huxleys began having their " tall teas " on Sunday 
evenings ; but during their first winter I seldom met 
any visitors at their house, except once or twice Ray 
Lankester and Michael Foster. Afterward, Huxley 
with his wife, on their visit to America, spent a few 
summer days with my family at Petersham, where the 
great naturalist learned for the first time what a tin 
dipper is. Once, in London, in speaking about the 
starry heavens, I had said that I never could make 
head or tail of any constellation except the Dipper, 
and of course everybody must recognize in that the 
resemblance to a dipper. To my surprise, one of the 
young ladies asked, " What is a dipper ? " My effort 
at explanation went far enough to evoke the idea of a 
" ladle," but with that approximation I was fain to let 
the matter rest until that August day in New England, 
when, after a tramp in the woods, my friends quaffed 
cool mountain water from a dipper, and I was told 
that not only the name, but the thing, is a Yankee 
notion. 

Some time after this I made several visits to Ens:- 
land, giving lectures at the Royal Institution and 
elsewhere, and saw the Huxleys often, and on one 



2i8 • REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 

occasion, with my wife, spent a fortnight or so at their 
home in Marlborough Place. The Sunday evenings 
had come to be a time for receiving friends, without 
any of the formality that often attaches to " receptions." 
Half a dozen or more would drop in for the " high 
tea." I then noticed the change in the adjective, and 
observed that the phrase and the institution were not 
absolutely confined to the Huxley household ; but 
their origin is still for me enshrouded in mystery, like 
the " empire of the Toltecs." After the informal and 
jolly supper others would come in, until the company 
might number from twenty to thirty. Among the 
men whom I recall to mind (the married ones accom- 
panied by their wives, of course) were Mark Pattison, 
Lecky, and J. R. Green, Burdon Sanderson and Lau- 
der Brunton, Alma Tadema, Sir James Stephen and 
his brother Leslie, Sir Frederick Pollock, Lord Ar- 
thur Russell, Frederic Harrison, Spencer Walpole, 
Romanes, and Ralston. Some of these I met for the 
first time ; others were old friends. Nothing could 
be more charming than the graceful simplicity with 
which all were entertained, nor could anything be 
more evident than the affectionate veneration which 
everybody felt for the host. 

The last time that I saw my dear friend was early 
in 1883, just before coming home to America. I 
found him lying on the sofa, too ill to say much, but 
not too ill for a jest or two at his own expense. The 
series of ailments had begun which were to follow 
him for the rest of his days. I was much concerned 
about him, but journeys to England had come to 
seem such a simple matter that the thought of its 
being our last meeting never entered my mind. A 



REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 219 

few letters passed back and forth with the lapse of 
years, the last one (in 1894) inquiring when I was 
likely to be able to come and visit him in the pretty 
home which he had made in Sussex, where he was 
busy with " digging in the garden and spoiling grand- 
children." When the news of the end came, it was 
as a sudden and desolating shock. 

There were few magazines or newspapers which did 
not contain articles about Huxley, and in general 
those articles were considerably more than the cus- 
tomary obituary notice. They were apt to be more 
animated than usual, as if they had caught something 
from the blithe spirit of the man ; and they gave so 
many details as to show the warm and widespread 
interest with which he was regarded. One thing, 
however, especially struck me. While the writers of 
these articles seemed familiar with Huxley's philo- 
sophical and literary writings, with his popular lec- 
tures on scientific subjects and his controversies with 
sundry clergymen, they seemed to know nothing what- 
ever about his original scientific work. It was really 
a singular spectacle, if one pauses to think about it. 
Here are a score of writers engaged in paying trib- 
ute to a man as one of the great scientific lights of the 
age, and yet, while they all know something about 
what he would have considered his fugitive work, not 
one of them so much as alludes to the cardinal 
achievements in virtue of which his name marks an 
epoch ! It is very much as if the biographers of 
Newton were to enlarge upon his official labours at 
the Mint and his theory of light, while preserving a 
dead silence as to gravitation and fluxions. A few 
words concerning Huxley's work will therefore not 



2 20 REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 

seem superfluous. A few words are all that can here 
be given ; I cannot pretend even to make a well- 
rounded sketch. 

In one respect there was a curious similarity be- 
tween the beginnings of Huxley's scientific career 
and of Darwin's. Both went, as young men, on long 
voyages into the southern hemisphere, in ships of the 
royal navy, and from the study of organisms encoun- 
tered on these voyages both were led to theories of vast 
importance. Huxley studied with keen interest and 
infinite patience the jellyfish and polyps floating on 
the surface of the tropical seas through which his ship 
passed. Without books or advisers, and with scant 
aid of any sort except his microscope, which had to be 
tied to keep it steady, he scrutinized and dissected 
these lowly forms of life, and made drawings and dia- 
grams illustrating the intricacies of their structure, 
until he was able, by comparison, to attain some very 
interesting results. During four years, he says, " I 
sent home communication after communication to the 
Linnasan Society, with the same result as that obtained 
by Noah when he sent the raven out of his ark. Tired 
at last of hearing nothing about them, I determined 
to do or die, and in 1849 I drew up a more elaborate 
paper, and forwarded it to the Royal Society." This 
was a memoir On the Anatomy and the Affinities of 
the Family of Medusae ; and it proved to be his dove, 
though he did not know it until his return to England, 
a year later. Then he found that his paper had been 
published, and in 185 1, at the age of twenty-six, he was 
made a Fellow of the Royal Society. He went on 
writing papers giving sundry results of his observations, 
and the very next year received the society's Royal 



REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 221 

medal, a supreme distinction which he shared with 
Joule, Stokes, and Humboldt. In the address upon the 
presentation of the medal, the president, Lord Rosse, 
declared that Huxley had not only for the first time 
adequately described the Medusae and laid down 
rational principles for classifying them, but had inaugu- 
rated " a process of reasoning, the results of which can 
scarcely yet be anticipated, but must bear in a very 
important degree upon some of the most abstruse 
points of what may be called transcendental physi- 
ology." 

In other words, the youthful Huxley had made a dis- 
covery that went to the bottom of things ; and as in 
most if not all such cases, he had enlarged our know- 
ledge, not only of facts, but of methods. It was the 
beginning of a profound reconstruction of the classifi- 
cation of animals, extinct and living. In the earlier 
half of the century the truest classification was Cu- 
vier's. That great genius emancipated himself from 
the notion that groups of animals should be arranged 
in an ascending or descending series, and he fully proved 
the existence of three divergent types, — Vertebrata, 
Mollusca, and Articulata. Some of the multitude of 
animals lower or less specialized than these he grouped 
by mistake along with Mollusca or Articulata, while 
all the rest he threw into a fourth class, which he called 
Radiata. It was evident that this type was far less 
clearly defined than the three higher types. In fact, it 
was open to the same kind of objection that used to be 
effectively urged against Max Miiller's so-called Tura- 
nian group of languages : it was merely a negation. 
Radiata were simply animals that were neither Articu- 
lata nor Mollusca nor Vertebrata ; in short, they were 



222 REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 

a motley multitude, about which there was a prevail- 
ing confusion of ideas at the time when young Huxley 
began the study of jellyfish. 

We all know how it was the work of the great 
Esthonian embryologist, Baer, that turned Herbert 
Spencer toward his discovery of the law of evolution. 
It is therefore doubly interesting to know that in these 
early studies Huxley also profited by his knowledge of 
Baer's methods and results. It all tended toward a 
theory of evolution, although Baer himself never got 
so far as evolution in the modern sense ; and as for 
Huxley, when he studied Medusae, he was not con- 
cerned with any general theory whatever, but only 
with putting into shape what he saw. 

And what he saw was that throughout their de- 
velopment the Medusae consist of two foundation 
membranes, or delicate weblike tissues of cells, — one 
forming the outer integument, the other doing duty 
as stomach lining, — and that there was no true body 
cavity with blood-vessels. He showed that groups ap- 
parently quite dissimilar, such as the hydroid and ser- 
tularian polyps, the Physophoridae and sea anemones, 
are constructed upon the same plan ; and so he built 
up his famous group of Coelenterata, or animals with 
only a stomach cavity, as contrasted with all higher 
organisms, which might be called Coelomata, or animals 
with a true body cavity, containing a stomach with other 
viscera and blood-vessels. In all Coelomata, from the 
worm up to man, there is a third foundation membrane. 

Thus the Cuvierian group of Radiata was broken up, 
and the way was prepared for this far more profound 
and true arrangement : (i) Protozoa, such as the amceba 
and sponges, in which there is no distinct separation 



REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 223 

of parts performing different functions ; (2) Coelente- 
rata, in which there is a simple differentiation between 
the inside, which accumulates energy, and the outside, 
which expends it; and (3) Coelomata, in which the in- 
side contains a more or less elaborate system of distinct 
organs devoted to nutrition and reproduction, while the 
outside is more or less differentiated into limbs and 
sense organs for interaction with the outer world. 
Though not yet an evolutionist, Huxley could not re- 
press the prophetic thought that Coelenterata are 
ancient survivals, representing a stage through which 
higher animal types must once have passed. 

As further elaborated by Huxley, the development 
above the coelenterate stage goes on in divergent lines ; 
stopping abruptly in some directions, in others going 
on to great lengths. Thus, in the direction taken by 
echinoderms, the physical possibilities are speedily ex- 
hausted, and we stop with starfishes and holothurians. 
But among Annuloida, as Huxley called them, there is 
more flexibility, and we keep on till we reach the true 
Articulata in the highly specialized insects, arachnoids, 
and crustaceans. It is still more interesting to follow 
the Molluscoida, through which we are led, on the one 
hand, to the true Mollusca, reaching their culmination 
in the nautilus and octopus, and on the other hand to 
the Tunicata, and so on to the vertebrates. 

In the comparative anatomy of vertebrates, also, 
Huxley's achievements were in a high degree original 
and remarkable. First in importance, perhaps, was 
his classification of birds, in which their true position 
and relationships were for the first time disclosed. 
Huxley showed that all birds, extinct and living, must 
be arranged in three groups, of which the first is repre- 



224 REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 

sented by the fossil archasopteryx with its hand-hke 
wing and lizard-like tail, the second by the ostrich and 
its congeners, and the third by all other living birds. 
He further demonstrated the peculiarly close relation- 
ship between birds and reptiles through the extinct 
dinosaurs. In all these matters his powerful originality 
Was shown in the methods by which these important 
results were reached. Every new investigation which 
he made seemed to do something toward raising the 
study of biology to a higher plane, as for example his 
celebrated controversy with Owen on the true nature 
of the vertebrate skull. The mention of Owen reminds 
us that it was also Huxley who overthrew Cuvier's 
order of Quadrumana, by proving that apes are not 
four-handed, but have two hands and two feet; he 
showed that neither in limbs nor in brain does man: 
present differences from other primates that are of 
higher than generic value. Indeed, there were few 
corners of the animal world, past or present, which 
Huxley did not at some time or other overhaul, and to 
our knowledge of which he did not make contributions 
of prime importance. The instances here cited may 
serve to show the kind of work which he did, but my 
mention of them is necessarily meagre. In the depart- 
ment of classification, the significance of which has 
been increased tenfold by the doctrine of evolution, 
his name must surely rank foremost among the suc- 
cessors of the mighty Cuvier. 

Before i860 the vastness and accuracy of Huxley's 
acquirements and the soundness of his judgment were 
well understood by the men of his profession, insomuch 
that Charles Darwin, when about to publish " The 
Origin of Species," said that there were three men in 



REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 225 

England upon whose judgment he reHed ; if he could 
convince those three, he could afford to wait for the 
rest. The three were Lyell, Hooker, and Huxley, and 
he convinced them. How sturdily Huxley fought 
Darwin's battles is inspiring to remember. Darwin 
rather shrank from controversy, and, while he welcomed 
candid criticism, seldom took any notice of ill-natured 
attacks. On one occasion, nevertheless, a somewhat 
■jgly assault moved Darwin to turn and rend the assail- 
ant, which was easily and neatly done in two pages at 
the end of a scientific paper. Before publishing the 
paper, however, Darwin sent it to Huxley, authorizing 
him to omit the two pages if he should think it best. 
Huxley promptly cancelled them, and sent Darwin a 
delicious little note, saying that the retort was so excel- 
lent that if it had been his own he should hardly have 
had virtue enough to suppress it ; but although it was 
well deserved, he thought it would be better to refrain. 
" If I say a savage thing, it is only ' pretty Fanny's 
way ' ; but if you do, it is not likely to be forgotten." 
There was a friend worth having ! 

There can be little doubt, I think, that, without a 
particle of rancour, Huxley did keenly feel the gaudium 
certaminis. He exclaimed among the trumpets. Ha ! 
ha ! and was sure to be in the thickest of the fight. 
His family seemed to think that the " Gladstonian 
dose " had a tonic effect upon him. When he felt too 
ill for scientific work, he was quite ready for a scrim- 
mage with his friends the bishops. Not caring much 
for episcopophagy (as Huxley once called it), and feel- 
ing that controversy of that sort was but a slaying of 
the slain, I used to grudge the time that was given to 
it and taken from other things. In 1879 he showed 

2Q 



226 REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 

me the synopsis of a projected book on " The Dog," 
which was to be an original contribution to the phylo- 
genetic history of the order Carnivora. The reader 
who recalls his book on " The Crayfish " may realize 
what such a book about dogs would have been. It 
was interrupted and deferred, and finally pushed aside, 
by the thousand and one duties and cares that were 
thrust upon him, — work on government commissions, 
educational work, parish work, everything that a self- 
sacrificing and public-spirited man could be loaded 
with. In the later years, whenever I opened a maga- 
zine and found one of the controversial articles, I read 
it with pleasure, but sighed for the dog book. 

I dare say, though, it was all for the best. " To 
smite all humbugs, however big ; to give a nobler tone 
to science ; to set an example of abstinence from petty 
personal controversies, and of toleration for everything 
but lying ; to be indifferent as to whether the work is 
recognized as mine or not, so long as it is done," — 
such were Huxley's aims in life. And for these things, 
in the words of good Ben Jonson, " I loved the man, 
and do honour to his memory, on this side idolatry, as 
much as any." 



VII 

HERBERT SPENCER'S SERVICE TO 
RELIGION 



VII 

HERBERT SPENCER'S SERVICE TO RELIGION i 

•' Evolution and religion : that which perfects hu- 
manity cannot destroy religion^ — Mr. President and 
Gentlemen : The thought which you have uttered 
suggests so many and such fruitful themes of discus- 
sion, that a whole evening would not suffice to enu- 
merate them, while to illustrate them properly would 
seem to require an octavo volume rather than a talk 
of six or eight minutes, especially when such a talk 
comes just after dinner. The Amazulu saying which 
you have cited, that those who have "stuffed bodies" 
cannot see hidden things, seems peculiarly applicable 
to any attempt to discuss the mysteries of religion at 
the present moment; and, after the additional warn- 
ing we have just had from our good friend Mr. Schurz, 
I hardly know whether I ought to venture to approach 
so vast a theme. There are one or two points of sig- 

1 This address was delivered by Dr. Fiske at the farewell banquet to Mr. 
Spencer given at Delmonico's on the evening of November 9, 1882, the 
Hon. William M. Evarts presiding. At its conclusion, Mr. Spencer, who sat 
near Dr. Fiske, partly rose in his chair and said, " Fiske, should you develop 
to the fullest the ideas you have expressed here this evening, I should regard it 
as a fitti7ig supplemettt to my life work.'''' A full report of the proceed- 
ings at the banquet, prepared in pamphlet form by Professor E. L. You- 
mans, under the title " Herbert Spencer on the Americans, and the 
Americans on Herbert Spencer," was published by D. Appleton & Com- 
pany in 1883. 

229 



230 HERBERT SPENCER'S SERVICE TO RELIGION 

nal importance, however, to which I may at least call 
attention for a moment. It is a matter which has long 
since taken deep hold of my mind, and I am glad to 
have a chance to say something about it on so fitting 
an occasion. We have met here this evening to do 
homage to a dear and noble teacher and friend, and 
it is well that we should choose this time to recall the 
various aspects of the immortal work by which he has 
earned the gratitude of a world. The work which 
Herbert Spencer has done in organizing the differ- 
ent departments of human knowledge, so as to present 
the widest generalizations of all the sciences in a new 
and wonderful light, as flowing out of still deeper and 
wider truths concerning the universe as a whole ; the 
great number of profound generalizations which he 
has established incidentally to the pursuit of this 
main object; the endlessly rich and suggestive 
thoughts which he has thrown out in such profusion 
by the wayside all along the course of this great phil- 
osophical enterprise — all this work is so manifest 
that none can fail to recognize it. It is work of the 
caliber of that which Aristotle and Newton did; 
though coming in this latter age, it as far surpasses 
their work in its vastness of performance as the rail- 
way surpasses the sedan chair, or as the telegraph sur- 
passes the carrier-pigeon. But it is not of this side 
of our teacher's work that I wish to speak, but of a 
side of it that has, hitherto, met with less general 
recognition. 

There are some people who seem to think that it 
is not enough that Mr. Spencer should have made all 
these priceless contributions to human knowledge, but 
actually complain of him for not giving us a complete 



HERBERT SPENCER'S SERVICE TO RELIGION 23 1 

and exhaustive system of theology into the bargain/ 
What I wish, therefore, to point out is that Mr. 
Spencer's work on the side of reHgion will be seen to 
be no less important than his work on the side of 
science, when once its religious implications shall 
have been fully and consistently unfolded. If we look 
at all the systems or forms of religion of which we 
have any knowledge, we shall find that they differ in 
many superficial features. They differ in many of 
the transcendental doctrines which they respectively 
preach, and in many of the rules of conduct which 
they respectively lay down for men's guidance. They 
assert different things about the universe, and they 
enjoin or prohibit different kinds of behaviour on the 
part of their followers. The doctrine of the Trinity, 
which to most Christians is the most sacred of myste- 
ries, is to all Mohammedans the foulest of blas- 
phemies ; the Brahman's conscience would be more 
troubled if he were to kill a cow by accident, than if 
he were to swear to a lie or steal a purse ; the Turk, 
who sees no wrong in bigamy, would shrink from the 
sin of eating pork. But, amid all such surface differ- 
ences, we find throughout all known religions two 
points of substantial agreement. And these two 
points of agreement will be admitted by modern civ- 
ilized men to be of far greater importance than the 
innumerable differences of detail. 

1 " It is clear that many persons have derived from Spencer's use of the 
word Unknowable an impression that he intends by metaphysics to refine 
God away into nothing, whereas he no more cherishes any such intention 
than did St. Paul, when he asked, 'Who hath known the mind of the Lord, 
or who hath been his counsellor' ; no more than Isaiah did when he de- 
declared, ' Even as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are Jehovah's 
ways higher than our ways and his thoughts than our thoughts.' " — John 
FiSKE, " Through Nature to God." 



232 HERBERT SPENCER'S SERVICE TO RELIGION 

All religions agree in the two following assertions, 
one of which is of speculative and one of which is of 
ethical importance. One of them serves to sustain 
and harmonize our thoughts about the world we live 
in, and our place in that world ; the other serves to 
uphold us in our efforts to do each what we can to 
make human life more sweet, more full of goodness 
and beauty, than we find it. The first of these asser- 
tions is the proposition that the things and events of 
the world do not exist or occur blindly or irrelevantly, 
but that all, from the beginning to the end of time, 
and throughout the furthest sweep of illimitable space, 
are connected together as the orderly manifestations 
of a divine Power, and that this divine Power is 
something outside of ourselves, and upon it our own 
existence from moment to moment depends. The 
second of these assertions is the proposition that men 
ought to do certain things, and ought to refrain from 
doing certain other things ; and that the reason why 
some things are wrong to do and other things are 
right to do is in some mysterious, but very real, way 
connected with the existence and nature of this divine 
Power, which reveals itself in every great and every 
tiny thing, without which not a star courses in its 
mighty orbit, and not a sparrow falls to the ground. 
Matthew Arnold once summed up these two propo- 
sitions very well when he defined God as " an eternal 
Power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness." 
This twofold assertion, that there is an eternal Power 
that is not ourselves, and that this Power makes for 
righteousness, is to be found, either in a rudimentary 
or in a highly developed state, in all known religions. 
In such religions as those of the Esquimaux or of 



HERBERT SPENCER'S SERVICE TO RELIGION 233 

your friends the Amazulus, Mr. President, this asser- 
tion is found in a rudimentary shape on each of its 
two sides, — the speculative side and the ethical side ; 
in such religions as Buddhism or Judaism it is found 
in a highly developed shape on both its sides. But 
the main point is that in all religions you find it in 
some shape or other. I said, a moment ago, that mod- 
ern civilized men will all acknowledge that this two- 
sided assertion, in which all religions agree, is of far 
greater importance than any of the superficial points 
in which religions differ. It is really of much more 
concern to us that there is an eternal Power, not our- 
selves, that makes for righteousness, than that such a 
Power is onefold or threefold in its metaphysical na- 
ture, or that we ought not to play cards on Sunday, or 
to eat meat on Friday. No one, I believe, will deny 
so simple and clear a statement as this. But it is not 
only we modern men, who call ourselves enlightened, 
that will agree to this. I doubt not even the narrow- 
minded bigots of days now happily gone by would 
have been made to agree to it if they could have had 
some doggedly persistent Socrates to cross-question 
them. Calvin was willing to burn Servetus for doubt- 
ing the doctrine of the Trinity, but I do not suppose 
that even Calvin would have argued that the belief in 
God's threefold nature was more fundamental than 
the belief in His existence and His goodness. The 
philosophical error with him was that he could not 
dissociate the less important doctrine from the more 
important doctrine, and the fate of the latter seemed 
to him wrapped up with the fate of the former. I 
cite this merely as a typical example. What men in 
past times have really valued in their religion has been 



2 34 HERBERT SPENCER'S SERVICE TO RELIGION 

the universal twofold assertion that there is a God, 
who is pleased with the sight of the just man and is 
angry with the wicked every day, and when men have 
fought with one another, and murdered or calumniated 
one another for heresy about the Trinity or about eat- 
ing meat on Friday, it has been because they have 
supposed belief in the non-essential doctrines to be 
inseparably connected with belief in the essential doc- 
trine. In spite of all this, however, it is true that in 
the mind of the uncivilized man, the great central 
truths of religion are so densely overlaid with hun- 
dreds of trivial notions respecting dogma and ritual, 
that his perception of the great central truths is ob- 
scure. |These great central truths, indeed, need to be 
clothed in a dress of little rites and superstition, in 
order to take hold of his dull and untrained intelli- 
gence. But in proportion as men become more civ- 
ilized, and learn to think more accurately, and to take 
wider views of life, just so do they come to value 
the essential truths of religion more highly, while 
they attach less and less importance to superficial 
details. 1 

Having thus seen what is meant by the essential 
truths of religion, it is very easy to see what the atti- 
tude of the doctrine of evolution is toward these 
essential truths. It asserts and reiterates them both ; 
and it asserts them not as dogmas handed down to us 
by priestly tradition, not as mysterious intuitive con- 
victions of which we can render no account to our- 
selves, but as scientific truths concerning the innermost 
constitution of the universe — truths that have been 
disclosed by observation and reflection, like other sci- 
entific truths, and that accordingly harmonize naturally 



HERBERT SPENCER'S SERVICE TO RELIGION 235 

and easily with the whole body of our knowledge. 
The doctrine of evolution asserts, as the widest and 
deepest truth which the study of nature can disclose 
to us, that there exists a power to which no limit in 
time or space is conceivable, and that all the phenom- 
ena of the universe, whether they be what we call 
material or what we call spiritual phenomena, are 
manifestations of this infinite and eternal Power. Now 
this assertion, which Mr. Spencer has so elaborately 
set forth as a scientific truth — nay, as the ultimate 
truth of science, as the truth upon which the whole 
structure of human knowledge philosophically rests 
— this assertion is identical with the assertion of an 
eternal Power, not ourselves, that forms the speculative 
basis of all religions. When Carlyle speaks of the 
universe as in very truth the star-domed city of God, 
and reminds us that through every crystal and through 
every grass blade, but most through every living 
soul, the glory of a present God still beams, he means 
pretty much the same thing that Mr. Spencer means, 
save that he speaks with the language of poetry, with 
language coloured by emotion, and not with the precise, 
formal, and colourless language of science. By many 
critics who forget that names are but the counters 
rather than the hard money of thought, objections 
have been raised to the use of such a phrase as the 
Unknowable, whereby to describe the power that is 
manifest in every event of the universe. Yet, when 
the Hebrew prophet declared that " by him were laid 
the foundations of the deep," but reminded us " Who 
by searching can find him out ? " he meant pretty much 
what Mr. Spencer means when he speaks of a power 
that is inscrutable in itself, yet is revealed from moment 



236 HERBERT SPENCER'S SERVICE TO RELIGION 

to moment in every throb of the mighty rhythmic Ufe 
of the universe. 

And this brings me to the last and most important 
point of all. What says the doctrine of evolution with 
regard to the ethical side of this twofold assertion 
that lies at the bottom of all religion ? Though we 
cannot fathom the nature of the inscrutable Power that 
animates the world, we know, nevertheless, a great 
many things that it does. Does this eternal Power, 
then, work for righteousness ? Is there a divine sanc- 
tion for holiness and a divine condemnation for sin ? 
Are the principles of right living really connected 
with the intimate constitution of the universe ? If the 
answer of science to these questions be affirmative, 
then the agreement with religion is complete, both on 
the speculative and on the practical side ; and that 
phantom which has been the abiding terror of timid 
and superficial minds — that phantom of the hostility 
between religion and science — is exorcised now and 
forever. Now, science began to return a decisively 
affirmative answer to such questions as these when it 
began, with Mr. Spencer, to explain moral beliefs and 
moral sentiments as products of evolution. For clearly, 
when you say of a moral belief or a moral sentiment, 
that it is a product of evolution, you imply that it is 
something which the universe through untold ages has 
been labouring to bring forth, and you ascribe to it a 
value proportionate to the enormous effort it has cost 
to produce it. Still more, when with Mr. Spencer we 
study the principles of right living as part and parcel 
of the whole doctrine of the development of life upon 
the earth ; when we see that in an ultimate analysis 
that is right which tends to enhance fulness of life, and 



HERBERT SPENCER'S SERVICE TO RELIGION 237 

that is wrong which tends to detract from fulness of 
life — we then see that the distinction between right 
and wrong is rooted in the deepest foundations of the 
universe ; we see that the very same forces, subtle, and 
exquisite, and profound, which brought upon the scene 
the primal germs of life and caused them to unfold, 
which through countless ages of struggle and death 
has cherished the life that could live more perfectly 
and destroyed the life that could only live less perfectly, 
until humanity, with all its hopes, and fears, and 
aspirations, has come into being as. the crown of all 
this stupendous work — we see that these very same 
subtle and exquisite forces have wrought into the very 
fibres of the universe those principles of right living 
which it is man's highest function to put into practice. 
The theoretical sanction thus given to right living is 
incomparably the most powerful that has ever been 
assigned in any philosophy of ethics. Human respon- 
sibility is made more strict and solemn than ever, when 
the eternal Power that lives in every event of the uni- 
verse is thus seen to be in the deepest possible sense 
the author of the moral law that should guide our lives, 
and in obedience to which lies our only guarantee of 
the happiness which is incorruptible — which neither 
inevitable misfortune nor unmerited obloquy can ever 
take away. I have but rarely touched upon a rich and 
suggestive topic. When this subject shall once have 
been expounded and illustrated with due thorough- 
ness — as I earnestly hope it will be within the next 
few years — then I am sure it will be generally acknow- 
ledged that our great teacher's services to religion have 
been no less signal than his services to science, unparal- 
leled as these have been in all the history of the world. 



VIII 
JOHN TYNDALL 



VIII 
JOHN TYNDALL 

The recent death of Professor Tyndall has removed 
from us a man of preeminent scientific and literary 
power, an early advocate and expositor of the doctrine 
of evolution, and one of the most genial and interest- 
ing personalities that could anywhere be found. It 
seems to me that this meeting of a club devoted to 
the study of evolution is a fitting occasion for a few 
words respecting Tyndall in these different capacities, — 
as a scientific inquirer, as an evolutionist, and as a man. 

Tyndall was born in August, 1820, and was there- 
fore four months younger than his friend, Herbert 
Spencer, whose seventy-fourth birthday will come on 
the twenty-seventh of next month. Tyndall's strong 
interest in science, like Spencer's, was manifested in 
boyhood, and there were some curious points of like- 
ness between the early careers of the two. Neither 
went to college or studied according to the ordinary 
routine, and both received marked intellectual stimu- 
lus from their fathers. As Spencer was engaged in 
civil engineering from the age of seventeen to that of 
one-and-twenty, during which time he took part in 
building the London and Birmingham Railroad, so 
Tyndall from nineteen to twenty-four was employed 
in the ordnance survey, and then for three years 
worked at civil engineering. Both went a good way 
in the study of mathematics, but the differences in 
2 R 241 



242 JOHN TYNDALL 

their dominant tastes were already shown. As a boy, 
Spencer was deeply interested in the rearing of in- 
sects and studying their transformations, while he 
also achieved no mean proficiency as a botanist. 
Tyndall, on the other hand, was from the first very 
much absorbed in molecular physics. The dance of 
molecules and atoms, in its varied figures, had an 
irresistible attraction for him. In 1848, after giving 
up his position as a civil engineer, he went to the 
University of Marburg, where he received a doctor's 
degree in 185 1. His work at the university consisted 
chiefly of original investigations on the relations of 
magnetism and diamagnetism to molecular arrange- 
ment. It resulted in a paper published in the Phil- 
osophical Magazine in 1850, which at once made 
Tyndall famous. It showed the qualities for which 
his work was ever afterward distinguished. As Hux- 
ley says of him : " That which he knew, he knew 
thoroughly, had turned over on all sides, and probed 
through and through. Whatever subject he took up, 
he never rested till he had attained a clear conception 
of all the conditions and processes involved, or had 
satisfied himself that it was not attainable. And in 
dealing with physical problems, I really think that he, 
in a manner, saw the atoms and molecules, and 'felt 
their pushes and pulls.' " 

When, after a further year of work at the University 
of Berlin, Tyndall returned to England, he was at once 
elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and one of the 
secretaries of the physical section of the British Asso- 
ciation, distinguished honours for a young man of two- 
and-thirty. In the following year he was appointed 
FuUerian Professor of Physics in the Royal Institution. 



JOHN TYNDALL 243 

This gave him command of a magnificent laboratory 
with which to pursue his investigations. Faraday was 
then Director of the Institution, so that for the next 
fourteen years the two men were brought into close 
relations. A more delightful situation for a scientific 
investigator can hardly be imagined. It was in 1851 
and 1852, just as this career of work in London was 
beginning, that Tyndall became acquainted with 
Spencer, who, as already observed, was about his own 
age, and with Huxley, who was five years younger. 
This was the beginning of friendships of the most 
intimate sort ; the mutual respect and affection be- 
tween the three was always charming to contemplate. 
On all sorts of minor topics they were liable to differ 
in opinion, and they never hesitated a moment about 
criticising or attacking each other. The atmosphere 
of the room in which those three men were gathered 
was not likely to be an atmosphere of monotonous 
assent ; the enlivening spice of controversy was seldom 
far away ; but the fundamental harmony between them 
was profound, for all cared immeasurably more for 
truth than for anything else. It was no small intel- 
lectual boon in life, no trifling moral support, for either 
of those men to have the friendship of the other two. 

Of Tyndall's original scientific work, an important 
part related to the explanation of the causes and nature 
of the motion of glaciers. His contributions to this 
difficult and important subject were of the highest 
value. These investigations led him to visit the Alps 
almost every year from 1856 until the close of his life, 
though long before the end the views set forth by him 
in i860 had come to be generally accepted. The ex- 
plorations in the Alps gave Tyndall a fine opportunity 



244 JOHN TYNDALL 

to indulge his propensity for climbing. It was not at 
all difficult to imagine him descended from a creature 
arboreal in its habits. He was very strong in the arms 
and fingers, while his weight, I should think, could 
hardly have exceeded one hundred and thirty, or at 
most one hundred and forty pounds. He would 
scamper up steep places like a cat. One of the 
Cunard captains told me that once when Tyndall 
crossed the ocean in his steamer, he had secured 
special permission to climb in the rigging, and seemed 
never so much at home as when slipping up between 
crosstrees or hanging upon a yard-arm. 

In 1867, on Faraday's death, Tyndall succeeded him 
as Director of the Royal Institution, and soon after- 
ward began his remarkable series of inquiries into the 
cause of the changing colours of the ocean. This led 
to inquiries into the light of the sky, and the discovery 
that its blue colour is due to the reflection of certain 
rays of light from the tiny surfaces of countless par- 
ticles of matter floating in the atmosphere. This 
opened the door to studies of the organic matter held 
in suspension in the atmosphere, and to the relations 
between dust and disease, a most fruitful subject. In 
the course of these studies occurred the famous con- 
troversy on Spontaneous Generation, in which Dr. 
Bastian contended that sundry low forms of life de- 
tected in hermetically sealed flasks must have been 
newly generated from organizable materials within the 
flask ; against which view Tyndall proved that no one 
has yet sealed a flask so hermetically that germs can- 
not enter. It was the same question which had been 
argued in France between Pouchet and Pasteur; but 
Tyndall's researches strengthened the case against 



JOHN TYNDALL 245 

spontaneous generation, and materially helped the 
new and epoch-making germ theory of disease. 

Another grand division of Tyndall's work relates to 
radiant heat. His work on this subject began in 1859, 
and was kept up during the greater part of his life. 
Perhaps the most important part of it was comprised 
in his researches on the transmutation of the dark heat 
rays below the red end of the spectrum and their rela- 
tions to the luminous rays. But upon these and sun- 
dry points in optics and acoustics to which Tyndall 
made notable contributions I do not feel competent to 
speak. 

Among those of Tyndall's books which have a place 
in literature as well as in science, " Heat considered as 
a Mode of Motion " is doubtless the most eminent. At 
the time when it was published, in 1863, the doctrines 
of the correlation of forces and the conservation of 
energy were still among the novelties, and the re- 
searches of Joule, Helmholtz, and Mayer, which had 
done so much to establish them, were not generally 
understood. Tyndall's book came in the nick of 
time ; it was a masterpiece of scientific exposition such 
as had not been seen for many a day ; and it did more 
than any other book to make men familiar with those 
all-pervading physical truths that lie at the bottom of 
the doctrine of evolution. This book, moreover, 
showed Tyndall not only as a master in physical 
investigation, but as an eminent literary artist and one 
of the best writers of English prose that our age has 
seen. 

Tyndall's other direct connections with the exposi- 
tion of evolution have consisted mainly in detached 
statements of special points from time to time in brief 



246 JOHN TYNDALL 

essays or lectures. The most famous of these was the 
Belfast Address, delivered in 1874, which created so 
much commotion for a short time. The cry of " mate- 
rialism," which then resounded so loudly, would now, 
I imagine, disturb very few people. So effective was 
it then in some quarters that in one of Tyndall's letters 
I find that Cardinal Cullen appointed a three days' fast, 
in order to keep infidelity out of Ireland. 

My new acquaintance with Tyndall began in 1872, 
when he was giving a course of lectures at the Lowell 
Institute in Boston. I had never been in England, 
but I had been in friendly correspondence with Her- 
bert Spencer for several years, so that I found the 
acquaintance with Tyndall was virtually made already, 
and we at once became warm friends. 

His success as a lecturer was complete. At first he 
was a little in danger from feeling in doubt as to the 
intellectual level of his audiences, — a doubt which 
has played the mischief with some British lecturers in 
America. The late Mr. Freeman, for example, thought 
it necessary to instruct his audiences in Boston and 
St. Louis in the rudiments of English history, and 
was voted a bore for his pains, when there was so 
much he might have said to which people would have 
listened with breathless interest. Tyndall received 
early warning to talk exactly as he would at the Royal 
Institution. His illustrative experiments were beauti- 
fully done, his speech was easy and eloquent, and his 
manner, so frank and earnest and kindly, was extremely 
winning. It was a rare treat to hear him lecture. 

Tyndall, though far from wealthy, was always in 
easy circumstances and was remarkably generous. I 
have read scores of his business letters to Youmans and 



JOHN TYNDALL 247 

the Appletons, since I have been writing the Life of 
Youmans/ and I have been struck with the fact that 
the question of payment never seemed to be in Tyn- 
dall's mind. Before he came over here he told You- 
mans that nothing would induce him to carry away 
a cent of American money. His one lecture season 
earned about $13,000 for him, and that he left in the 
hands of trustees as a fund for helping the study of 
the natural sciences in America. 

The next year I went to England and spent most 
of a year in London. Then I saw much of Tyndall, 
as well as of Spencer and Huxley. I dined with them 
once at their famous X Club, of which the six other 
members were Hooker, Busk, Frankland, Lubbock, 
Hirst, and Spottiswoode. As Spencer says, " out of 
this nine [he himself] was the only one who was 
fellow of no society and had presided over nothing." 
It was a jolly company. They dined together once a 
month, and the ordering of a dinner was usually en- 
trusted to Spencer, who was an expert in gastronomy, 
and as eminent in the synthesis of a menu as in 
any other branch of synthetic philosophy. Tyndall 
abounded in good humour and was then as always one 
of the merriest of the party. We often met, sometimes 
with Clifford and Lewes, at dainty little suppers in 
Spencer's lodgings, or at Sunday evening teas at Hux- 
ley's, on which occasions I have known men berated 
as materialists to join in singing psalm-tunes. But 
one of the best places to hobnob with Tyndall was in 
his own lodgings at the top of the Royal Institution, 
on Albemarle Street, the rooms which had once been 

^ " Edward Livingston Youmans," by John Fiske. D. Appleton & 
Company, 1894. 



248 JOHN TYNDALL 

occupied by Sir Humphry Davy and then by Fara- 
day. It was always an inspiration to go there. In 
those days Tyndall kept bachelor's hall, and it was his 
regular habit, year after year, to dine with Spencer 
and Hirst at the Athenaeum Club. But at length, in 
the course of his Alpine scrambles, he met the charm- 
ing and accomplished lady who, in 1875, became his 
wife. She must have been twenty years younger than 
himself. She was daughter of Lord Claud Hamil- 
ton, member of a well-known Scottish family, and 
thereby hung a Httle incident which used to make us 
all laugh. The association between Tyndall and Hux- 
ley long ago became in some people's minds so close 
as to identify the one with the other. So when Huxley 
and his wife, who had been married nearly thirty years 
and had seven children, came to America in 1876, one 
of the New York papers gravely heralded the arrival of 
Huxley with his titled bride ! ^ And this sort of blun- 
der is not peculiar to America. In a recent letter, 
Huxley tells me that since Tyndall's death he has 
read in a religious paper an obituary notice in which 
he [Huxley] figures instead of his friend, and is 
roundly vituperated for his flagrant heresies. 

The last time I ever saw Tyndall was when I was 
last in England, in 1883. He was then living with 
his wife in those same old rooms at the Royal Insti- 
tution, and there I dined with them and spent several 
evenings. 

1 This incident is mentioned in " Reminiscences of Huxley," p. 200. 



IX 

EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 



IX 

EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 

It has now for many years been a matter of common 
remark that we are Hving in a wonderful age, an age 
which has witnessed extraordinary material and intel- 
lectual progress. This is a mere commonplace, but it 
is not until we have given some close attention to the 
facts that we realize the dimensions of the truth which 
it expresses. The chief characteristics of the nine- 
teenth century may be said to have been on the mate- 
rial side the creation of mechanical force, and on the 
intellectual side the unification of nature. Neither of 
these expressions is quite free from objections, but they 
will sufficiently serve the purpose. When we consider 
the creation of mechanical force, it is clear that what 
has been done in this direction since the days of James 
Watt marks an era immeasurably greater than that of 
the rise or fall of any historic empire. It marks an era 
as sharp and bold as that era which witnessed the 
domestication of oxen and horses far back in the dim 
prehistoric past. Man was but a feeble creature when 
his only means of carriage was his two feet, and his 
tools were such as a wooden stick for a crowbar and a 
stone for cracking nuts, and his diet was limited to 
fruit and herbs, or such fish as he could catch in shal- 
low waters and devour without cooking. Countless 
poets have celebrated the day when he first learned 
how to strike a spark from the stone and kindle a fire. 

251 



252 EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 

The remembrance of it, indeed, hovers over many a 
system of ancient mythology, where the Prometheus 
who brings to mankind the good gift of fire is apt to 
be associated with the Dionysus who teaches him how 
to ferment his drinks. A great step forward it was 
when the invention of the bow and arrow enabled him 
to slay his foes at a distance, and greatly increase his 
supply of game ; another great step it was when the 
water-tight baskets, and still better, the kettle of baked 
clay, enabled him to boil his roots and herbs, his fish 
and fiesh ; all these were stages in progress that mark 
long eras in that remote past which we call the Stone 
Age. 

During all those weary stages man could control 
only such mechanical force as was supplied by his 
own muscles, eked out here and there by the rudest 
forms of lever and wedge, roller and pulley, such as 
are found in the absence of tools, or perhaps by 
the physical strength of his fellow-men, if he were so 
fortunate as to control it. But a time came when man 
learned how to turn to his own uses the gigantic 
strength of oxen and horses, and when that day came 
it was such an era as the world had never before wit- 
nessed. So great and so manifold were the results of 
this advancement, that doubtless they furnished the 
principal explanation of the fact that the human race 
developed so much more rapidly in the eastern hemi- 
sphere than in the western. In my book on the Dis- 
covery of America, I have shown that at the time when 
the western hemisphere was visited by the Europeans 
of the sixteenth century after Christ its foremost races, 
in the highlands of Mexico, Central America, and Peru, 
had in respect of material progress reached a point 



EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 253 

nearly abreast of that which had been attained in 
Egypt and Babylonia, perhaps seven thousand or eight 
thousand years before Christ; and this difference of 
nine or ten millenniums in advancement can be to a 
very considerable extent explained by the absence of 
horses and oxen in the western hemisphere. If such 
a statement surprises you, just stop and consider what 
an immense part of our modern civilization goes back 
by linear stages of succession to the era of pastoral life, 
that state of society which is described for us in the 
book of Genesis and in the Odyssey ; then try to imag- 
ine what the history of the world as we know it would 
have been without that pastoral stage. But I must 
not tarry over this point. Another great stage was 
marked by the smelting of iron, and yet another by 
the invention of writing ; the latter being on the intel- 
lectual side of progress an equivalent for the acquisi- 
tion of ox and horse power on the material side. 

Now this invention of writing seems very ancient, 
for the city of Nippur contains tablets which may be 
eight thousand or nine thousand years old, yet which 
are perfectly legible for modern scholars. The interval 
is not a long one when measured by the existence of 
the human race, yet it naturally seems long to our un- 
taught minds because it includes and contains the 
whole of recorded human history. Here we come 
upon one of the things which the doctrine of evolution 
is doing for us. It is altering our perspective ; it is 
teaching us that the whole of recorded history is but a 
narrow fringe upon the stupendous canvas along which 
the existence of humanity stretches back ; and thus it 
is profoundly modifying our view of man in his rela- 
tions to the universe. 



254 EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 

Be it long or short, the next epoch-marking change 
experienced by mankind after the dawn of civilization 
was the invention of the steam engine by James Watt. 
The impulse to this stupendous invention was given 
by Joseph Black's discovery of latent heat, one of the 
first long strides that was made into the region of 
molecular physics. From Black and Watt down to the 
latest discoveries in electricity there has been an un- 
broken sequence of achievement, and its fundamental 
characteristic has been the creation of mechanical force 
or motor energy. This has become possible through 
our increased knowledge of the interior constitution 
of matter. Having learned something about the habits 
and proclivities of atoms and molecules, we are taking 
advantage of this knowledge to accumulate vast quan- 
tities of force and turn it in directions prescribed by 
human aims and wants. This may properly be called 
creation, in the same sense that a poem or a symphony 
is created. We apply the qualities of matter to the 
achievement of results impossible save through the 
intervention of man. 

The most striking fact about this voluntary creation 
of motor energy is the sudden and enormous extension 
which it has given to human power over the world in 
innumerable ways. It has been well said that our 
world at the present day is much smaller and more 
snug than the world in the time of Herodotus, inas- 
much as a man can now travel the whole length of the 
earth's circumference in less time than it would have 
taken Herodotus to go the length of the Mediterranean, 
and not only in less time, but with much less discomfort 
and peril and with fewer needful changes of speech. 
This is very true, but it could not have been said a 



EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 255 

hundred years ago. The change has occurred close 
upon our own time. 

When the postal service was inaugurated between 
New York and Boston in 1673 by Governor Lovelace, 
it took a month to cover the distance on horseback, 
and people were fain to be content with letters and 
news a month old. Midway between that time and 
the present, in the days when a group of statesmen 
assembled at Philadelphia were framing our federal 
constitution, the distance between New York and 
Boston had been reduced from a month to a week, and 
a single stage-coach starting daily from each end of 
the route sufficed for all the passengers and all the 
freight between the two cities except such bulky freight 
as went by sea. Now the fact that we can go from New 
York to Paris or to Vancouver Island within the com- 
pass of a week brings with it many far-reaching conse- 
quences. Politically, it gives to a nation like our own, 
spread over three million square miles of territory, such 
advantages as were formerly confined to small states like 
the republics of ancient Greece, or of Italy and the 
Netherlands in the Middle Ages. It is perpetually 
bringing people into contact with new faces, new climes, 
new forms of speech, new habits of thought, thus mak- 
ing the human mind more flexible than of old, more hos- 
pitable toward new ideas, more friendly to strangers. 
But these are not the only effects. Not only have 
numerous petty manufactures, formerly carried on in 
separate households, given place to gigantic factories, 
but the organization of every form of industry has been 
profoundly modified by railways and telegraphs. It 
becomes easier in many instances to do things directly 
that would once have been done by proxy, or, if 



256 EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 

agencies are resorted to, they can be established where 
once they would not have paid ; materials are em- 
ployed which the cost of transportation would once 
have made inaccessible; great commercial houses at 
distant points supersede small ones near at hand, while 
vast sections of farming and grazing country are brought 
near to metropolitan markets thousands of miles off ; 
and thus in these various ways the tendency is to 
specialize industries in the places where they can best 
be conducted. The net result is a marked increase 
in the comfort of the great mass of people. A given 
amount of human effort can secure a much greater 
number of the products of industry, so that life is on 
its material side variously enriched. 

But there are other ways of creating motor energy 
besides utilizing the expansive force of steam. Almost 
hand in hand with the development of the steam engine 
has gone the progress of electric discovery from Galvani 
and Volta to Faraday, calling into existence a number 
of astounding inventions and introducing us to a new 
chamber in the temple of knowledge of which we have 
doubtless barely crossed the threshold. I need not 
enlarge upon the telephone, the phonograph, the use 
of electricity for lighting and heating, but a word may 
be said concerning electricity as a source of motor 
power on a great scale. What would men have said 
a century ago to the idea of harnessing the stupendous 
gravitative force of Niagara Falls into the service of 
manufactories in the city of Buffalo, simply by turning 
it into electricity and distributing it on wires over miles 
of country ? Yet at that time one of the greatest of 
American thinkers, Benjamin Thompson of Woburn, 
better known as Count Rumford, was leading the way 



EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 257 

toward the establishment of the theory upon which 
that mighty achievement rests, the theory of the cor- 
relation of forces, or rather, perhaps, of the transform- 
ableness of modes of molecular motion, which is to-day 
the fundamental truth upon which the doctrine of evo- 
lution is based. 

I spoke a moment ago of the great historic impor- 
tance of the domestication of oxen and horses. The 
essential feature of the present day is that instead of 
borrowing motor energy from these noble and benefi- 
cent creatures, we manufacture it through deft manipu- 
lation of the forces of inorganic matter. Already the 
time is visibly approaching when the muscular strength 
of horses and oxen will be among the least of their 
uses to man. The number of horseless carriages that 
one meets on the street increases day by day ; and elec- 
tric cars, even in their present clumsy stage of devel- 
opment, are doing much to modify the face of things. 
One of the first effects of railways was to centralize 
industries and enable a greater number of people to 
live upon a given area ; and hence one of the charac- 
teristic features of the century, by no means confined 
to America, has been the unprecedented increase in 
the size of cities. Now a visible effect of the short- 
distance electric tramway is to aid the diffusion of 
city populations over increasingly large suburban 
areas. The result will doubtless be to enhance alike 
the comfort of the town and the civilization of the 
country. 

Yet another method of creating motor energy is 
through chemical processes, one of the earliest of which 
was the invention of gunpowder four centuries ago; 
but at the close of the eighteenth century a new era set 



258 EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 

in and chemistry entered upon a career of achievement 
too vast for the imagination to compass. In my own 
mind familiarity has not yet begun to deaden tne feel- 
ing of stupefied amazement when I reflect that scarcely 
a century has elapsed since Dr. Priestley informed man- 
kind of the existence of oxygen. At the present day man 
has created in the laboratory more than one hundred 
thousand distinct substances which never existed before 
and never would have come into existence but for the hu- 
man mind. We are now able to deal with one hundred 
thousand kinds of matter which were absent from the 
world of our great-grandfathers. These new material 
creations have their properties, like other kinds of matter. 
They react upon incident forces, each after its peculiar 
manner. They are useful in countless ways in the 
industrial arts, they furnish us with thousands of new 
medicines, and here and there they enable our spiritual 
vision to penetrate a little farther than formerly into 
the habits and behaviour of the myriad swinging and 
dancing atoms that taken together make the visible 
world. 

I have said enough for my present purpose about 
that creation of motor energy, alike in regard to masses 
and in regard to molecules and atoms, which is the 
leading characteristic of the present age on its ma- 
terial side. We have now to consider what I called 
its chief characteristic on the intellectual or spiritual 
side, namely, the unification of nature. I said at the 
outset that this phrase is not altogether satisfactory, 
and perhaps we might substitute for it the doctrine of 
evolution. At all events, I wish to point out that the 
doctrine of evolution amounts to pretty much the same 
thing as the unification of nature. In order to illustrate 



EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 259 

my meaning, let us consider a few familiar incidents 
in the history of scientific discovery. 

Every achievement in science has consisted in point- 
ing out likenesses that had before remained undetected. 
Every scientific inquirer is on the lookout for such 
likenesses. If the likeness assigned be a wrong one, 
we have false science. For example, in order to ac- 
count for the movement of the starry heaven from east 
to west, some of the ancient astronomers fancied that 
the earth was encompassed by a revolving crystalline 
sphere in which countless points of light were set for 
the purpose of illuminating the earth during the sun's 
absence. Because the stars preserve the same relations 
of position, one to another, they were supposed to be 
fastened on the inside of this sphere, and in accordance 
with this theory we have such phrases as "fixed stars" 
and "firmament." Here men sought to explain the un- 
known by analogies with the known, but the likeness 
turned out to have been entirely mistaken. The merit 
of the Newtonian astronomy was that it found in the 
known world the correct likeness to that which was 
going on in the unknown world. Copernicus had 
shown that it is not the earth, but the sun, which forms 
the centre of the planetary system ; Kepler had gone 
on to show that the planets revolve about the sun in 
ellipses and in accordance with certain laws of motion 
which he described ; the question remained, Why do 
the planets move in this way ? Does each one have a 
guardian angel to pull it or push it along, or must we 
perhaps give up the case without any explanation? 
Then Newton came and showed that what happens in 
the sky is just what happens on the earth. The earth 
pulls the moon exactly as it pulls the falling apple; 



26o EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 

and the moon does not fall simply because its momen- 
tum keeps it as far away as it can get, exactly like a 
pebble whirled at the end of a string. It remained to 
show that the force of the pull varied directly with the 
mass of the bodies, and inversely, with the squares of 
their distances apart; and then it became necessary to 
know that the planetary motions thus produced would 
agree with what Kepler had shown them to be. The 
successful accomplishment of this task remains to-day 
the great typical instance of a perfect scientific discov- 
ery. It is further memorable as the first successful 
leap of the human mind from the earth on which man 
treads into the abysses of celestial space. Be it ob- 
served that what Newton did was to show that through- 
out the world of the solar system certain things go on 
exactly as they do in your own parlour and kitchen. 
Whether it be in the next street or out on the farthest 
planet, it is equally true that unsupported bodies fall 
and that things whirled try to get away. 

I say, then, that Newton's discovery was a great step 
toward the unification of nature ; it was the first deci- 
sive step in the demonstration that the universe is not 
one thing here and another thing there, but is animated 
by a principle of action that yields similar results wher- 
ever you go. Newton expressed his law of gravitation 
in terms that were universal, and there can be no doubt 
that he believed it to hold true of the stellar regions ; 
yet it is only within the present century that the cor- 
rectness of this latter opinion has been proved by direct 
observation. We may now safely affirm that the whole 
stellar universe conforms to the law of gravitation, but 
we can also go much farther than this. The wonderful 
discovery of spectrum analysis by Kirchhoff and Bunsen 



EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 26 1 

in 1 86 1 has shown that the whole stellar universe is 
made up of the same chemical materials as those with 
which we are familiar upon the earth. A part of the 
dazzling brilliance of the noonday sun is due to the 
vapour of iron floating in his atmosphere, and the faint 
luminosity of the remotest cloud-like nebula is the glow 
of just such hydrogen as enters into every drop of water 
that we drink. But this is not quite the whole story. 
The study of spectrum analysis has shown that the 
most deeply individual and characteristic attribute of 
any substance whatever is the number and arrange- 
ment of the lines and bands which it makes in the 
spectrum. You cannot say of iron that it is always 
black, for you have often seen it red, and occasionally, 
perhaps, white ; nor can you say that it is always cold 
or hard ; and if it has weight invariably, that is no more 
than can be said of other things besides iron. But 
whether black or white, hot or cold, smooth or rough, 
hard or soft, iron is that substance which when heated 
till it is luminous, always throws upon the spectrum 
the same elaborately complicated system of lines and 
bands, which are different from those that are thrown 
by any other substance. The revelations of the spec- 
troscope therefore show that in all parts of the universe 
the interior constitution of matter is the same, and that 
its manifestations in the forms of light and heat are of 
the same character and conformable to the same physi- 
cal laws. There is not one science of mechanics for 
the earth, or one kind of optics for Sirius, or one law 
of radiation for Jupiter, but from end to end of the visi- 
ble universe the same laws hold sway and the funda- 
mental principles of action are the same. 

Not only is it true that the same physical laws hold 



262 EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 

good throughout all space, but also throughout all 
time, as far as the farthest stretches of space and 
time that science can reveal to us. These are points 
of singular interest, inasmuch as our solar system is 
by no means stationary in the universe. It has long 
been known that our sun is flying through space with 
enormous velocity toward the region which we call 
the constellation Hercules, carrying with him his 
attendant planets with their moons. The revolving 
year, therefore, never brings us back to the place 
where it found us, but to a point many millions of 
miles distant. Is there not something rather thrilling 
in the thought that we are never staying in a familiar 
spot, but always plunging with a speed more than a 
thousand times as great as that of an express train 
through black and silent abysses never before revealed 
to us? Such being the case, it is interesting to be 
assured that no matter how long this continues, we 
may depend upon the beneficent uniformity of nature's 
processes. The mariners of four centuries ago, who 
urged their frail ships down the Senegambian coast 
toward the equator, were sometimes assailed with 
fears lest they should suddenly come into some boil- 
ing sea, where clouds of scalding steam would engulf 
them. But that unification of nature toward which 
modern science has led us quite removes the fear that, 
in the future wanderings of our earthly habitat, we are 
likely to encounter any other conditions than those 
that have prevailed throughout the past. 

The unification of nature in point of time has been 
the work of the nineteenth century and especially of 
its geologists. When it was first proved that the age 
of the earth is not six thousand years, but many mill- 



EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 263 

ions, there was a tendency to suppose that in earlier 
ages the agencies at work in modifying the earth's 
surface must have been far more violent than at 
present. It was quite natural that people should 
think so. The changes which geology revealed were 
apt to be mighty changes ; layers of strata many miles 
in area wrenched out of place and perhaps turned up 
on edge, erratic blocks of stone carried thousands of 
miles from home in glaciers more than a mile in thick- 
ness, long stretches of sea-coast torn away by the rest- 
less waves, mountains bearing on their summits the 
telltale evidences that they had once been submerged 
in the ocean ; all these things seemed to speak of 
gigantic displays of force like the wanton play of 
Titans and Asuras in the ancient mythologies. Still 
more was this view impressed upon the mind as the 
wonders of paleontology became gradually revealed to 
us. Here we were shown a succession of past ages, 
during which the aspect of things was totally different 
from what it is now. There was, for example, the age 
when the great coal measures were deposited, char- 
acterized by a dense and suffocating atmosphere, with 
vegetation generally as exuberant as that of modern 
Brazil, with colossal tree ferns abounding, but not a 
single deciduous tree or flowering herb in existence. 
That Carboniferous age had its day and vanished, leav- 
ing its vegetable wealth locked up in the bowels of 
the earth to heat the houses and propel the engines 
of men in this age of ours. By and by there was a 
Jurassic age, when reptiles were the lords of creation, 
the bulkiest animals ever seen upon earth, yet with 
brains too small to do more than guide their clumsy 
movements. Those were the days when the Atlanta- 



264 EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 

saurus, with body one hundred feet long and tail as 
stout as a ship's mast, dragged his unwieldy length 
over the plains of Montana, while in every latitude 
and clime you would come upon similar cold-blooded 
dinosaurs, sometimes bigger than elephants, sometimes 
as small as mice, stalking through the landscape or 
burrowing underground, sitting upright, kangaroo 
fashion, with heads near the tree-tops, flying about 
in the gloaming with bat-like wings like a schooner's 
mainsail, or sailing in the seas with long crane-like 
necks reared aloft above the water. Those were long 
days, but they too passed, and the years are millions 
since the last dinosaur perished. And then, to men- 
tion just one more, we are introduced to an Eocene 
world, about which the most striking things are the 
appearance of deciduous trees alongside of the ever- 
greens, the vast and varied development of beautiful 
forms and colours simultaneously in the insect world 
and in the world of flowers, and lastly, the presence 
of sundry queer-looking, warm-blooded mammals cal- 
culated to produce in an observer the state of mind of 
old Polonius, for one would seem like a pig were it 
not also something like a small donkey, another would 
seem about midway between cat, rabbit, and monkey, 
all of them being generalized types which have since 
been variously specialized. I need not add that these 
creatures, too, are all gone. 

Now in view of such repeated and wholesale de- 
struction of life, it was not strange that the geologists 
of a hundred years ago should have imagined a succes- 
sion of dire catastrophes involving a large part or the 
whole of the earth's surface. It was supposed that 
the beginning and end of every great geologic period 



EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 265 

such as the Carboniferous or the Jurassic or the 
Eocene, here selected for mention, were characterized 
by such catastrophes, which swept from the face of the 
earth all existing forms of life. It was supposed that 
the introduction of a new geologic period was marked 
by a fresh introduction of living beings through some 
inexplicable act of wholesale creation. There were 
plenty of facts, indeed, which did not harmonize with 
this view, such, for example, as the continuous exist- 
ence of a certain kind of shell-fish known as trilobites 
through many successive geologic periods. The 
theory of catastrophes appeared to demand the assump- 
tion that these trilobites were wiped out and created 
over again half a dozen times ; which was rather a 
shock to men's acquired notions of probability. 

The complete overthrow of this doctrine of catas- 
trophes was effected by Sir Charles Lyell, whose great 
book was published in 1830. The difficulty with the 
catastrophizers was that while talking glibly about 
millions of years, they had not stopped to consider 
what is meant by a million years when it takes the 
shape of work accomplished. Suppose you were to 
go to the Grand Canon of the Colorado River, and 
stand upon the fearful brink of the gorge, where it is 
more than a mile in depth, looking down at the stream 
like a tiny bright ribbon at the bottom, and were told 
that this stream is wearing off from its rocky bed about 
one-tenth of an inch every year, how your mind would 
feel staggered in the attempt to estimate the length of 
time it must have taken to excavate the whole of that 
mighty gorge ! Your first impulse would certainly be 
to speak of quadrillions of years, or something of the 
sort ; yet a simple calculation shows that one million 



266 EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 

of years would much more than suffice for the whole 
process. Now all over the globe the myriad raindrops, 
rushing in rivers to the sea, are with tireless industry 
working to obliterate existing continents, and the 
mean rate at which they are accomplishing this work 
of denudation seems to be about one foot in three 
thousand years. At this rate, and from the action of 
rivers alone, it would take just about two million years 
to wear the whole existing continent of Europe, with 
all its huge mountain masses, down to the sea level. 

It was the application of such considerations by Sir 
Charles Lyell to the great problems of geology, taken 
up one after another, that revolutionized the whole 
study of the earth's surface. It soon became clear that 
the great catastrophes were entirely unnecessary to 
account for the effects which we see ; and for the first 
time in the history of human thought we had brought 
before us, on the most colossal scale, the truth that 
there is nothing in the universe which accomplishes 
so much as the incessant cumulative action of tiny 
causes. This great thought has a significance that is 
manifold and far-reaching; it penetrates the moral 
world as well as the intellectual, and when thoroughly 
grasped, it affects the conduct of our lives as power- 
fully as the direction of our thoughts. It affords a 
suggestive commentary upon that sublime scene in the 
Old Testament which suggested to Mendelssohn the 
greatest of his works, the scene in which Jehovah 
reveals Himself, not in the fire nor the earthquake nor 
the tempest, but in the still, small voice. 

This theory of Lyell's was at first known as Uni- 
formitarianism as contrasted with Catastrophism. It 
has everywhere won the field, but with sundry qualifi- 



EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 267 

cations and explanations. It is not believed that 
the earth's surface was always so quiet as at present, 
because it is an accepted opinion among men of 
science that the earth was once a vaporous body 
immensely hotter than at present and to some extent 
self-luminous, as Jupiter and Saturn are to-day. Such 
a state of things was a state of more or less curious 
commotion such as may now be witnessed upon the 
surfaces of those planets which are so big that they 
still remain hot. Obviously, the cooling of the earth's 
surface, with the formation of a crust, must have en- 
tailed increasing quiet, and it was of course not until 
long after the formation of a solid crust with liquid 
oceans that organic life could have begun to exist. 
Even after the introduction of plants and animals, the 
energies of the heated interior, imperfectly repressed, 
broke forth from time to time in local catastrophes 
upon the surface, though doubtless never in one that 
could be called universal. 

In early geologic ages there were doubtless earth- 
quakes and floods more violent than any recorded in 
history, but the chief agencies of change were the quiet 
ones, and in general, if at any time you had visited the 
earth, you would have found a peaceful scene where 
gentle showers and quickening sunshine coaxed forth 
the sprouting herbage, with worms crawling in the 
ground and quadrupeds of some sort browsing on the 
vegetation, and never would there just come a time 
when you could say that the old age had gone and a 
new one succeeded it. How does one generation of 
men succeed another.? The fathers are not swept 
away in a body to make room for the children, but one 
by one the old drop off and the young come on till a 



268 EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 

day is reached when none of those remain that once 
were here. How does some form of human speech 
become extinct ? About a hundred years ago an old 
lady named Dolly Dentreath died in Cornwall. She 
could speak the Cornish language ; after her death 
there was nobody that could. Thus quietly did the 
living Cornish language become a dead language ; and 
in a like unobtrusive manner have been wrought most 
of the new becomings which have changed and are 
changing the earth. 

The net result of all this study was that the same 
kind of forces were at work a hundred million years 
ago that are at work to-day, and that the lessons gained 
from our familiar experiences may safely be applied to 
the explanation of phenomena the most remote in time 
as well as in space. In a still more striking degree 
was this exemplified in the researches of Darwin. 
When it became clear that there had been no universal 
catastrophes, it was also clear that the persistence of 
trilobites and other creatures unchanged through suc- 
cessive periods simply showed that they had existed all 
the time because the conditions happened to be favour- 
able. But then it was further noticed that where in 
some given territory one geologic period follows an- 
other, the creatures of the latter period resemble those 
of the earlier much more closely than the creatures of 
some distant region. Thus, through many successive 
periods South America has abounded in animals of 
the general types of armadillo, sloth, and ant-eater. 
For example, although the change from the mega- 
therium of the Pliocene age to the modern sloth is 
greater than the change from a Bengal tiger to kitty 
that purrs on the hearth, yet after all the megatherium 



EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 269 

is of the sloth type. But if megatherium was once 
annihilated by some grand convulsion, after which a 
fresh creation of mammals occurred in South America, 
why should a sloth occur among the new creations 
rather than a kangaroo or an elephant ? For a while 
the advocates of special creations had their answer 
ready. They said that every animal is best suited to 
the conditions in which he lives, that he was created 
in order to fit those conditions; therefore God has 
repeatedly created anew the sloth type of animal in 
South America because it has all along been best 
fitted to the conditions to which animal life is subjected 
there. But this ingenious argument was soon over- 
thrown. It is true that every animal is more or less 
adapted to the environment in which he lives, for 
otherwise he would at once become extinct ; but in 
order to determine whether he is best adapted to that 
environment, it remains to be seen whether he can 
maintain himself in it against all comers. Now in a 
great many instances he is far from able to do this. 
New Zealand grass is fast disappearing before grass 
introduced from Europe, and the marsupials of Aus- 
tralia are being surely and steadily extirpated by the 
introduction of species with widely different structure 
but similar habits. Thus the marsupial rodent is van- 
ishing before the European rat even faster than the 
native black fellow is vanishing in presence of English- 
men. 

Now if the Creator followed the rule of putting 
wild species only in the habitats best suited to them, 
He would have put the European rat in Australia, and 
not the marsupial rodent. This illustration shows how 
far the old style of explanation failed to suit the facts. 



270 EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 

It is now understood that one of the principal factors 
in establishing a high degree of vitality has been com- 
petition for the means of supporting life. In the great 
continental mass of Europe, Asia, and Africa the 
forms of life have been most numerous and the com- 
petition has been keenest ; hence life, both animal and 
vegetable, has been more strongly developed than else- 
where; creatures have been produced that are tougher 
and more resourceful than in other places ; they have 
the peculiar combinations of qualities that enable their 
possessors to live more highly developed. Second in 
this respect comes North America; then, very far 
below it, because more isolated, comes South America; 
lowest of all, because most isolated, comes Australasia. 
Australian man is the lowest of the human species, 
not having risen to the bow-and-arrow stage; the 
Maori of New Zealand, a high type of barbarian, is not 
indigenous, but a comparatively late arrival ; in its 
natural history generally Australasia has only reached 
a point attained in the northern hemisphere two or 
three geological periods ago. In the chalk period mar- 
supials abounded in Europe, but they were long ago 
extinguished by placental mammals of greater vitality, 
and the same thing is now happening in Australasia. 
The true reason for the resemblance between any 
fauna and its predecessors in the same area is that 
the later forms are the slightly modified descendants 
of the earlier forms. Thus there arose the suspicion 
that the millions of separate acts of creation once 
thought necessary to account for the specific forms of 
plants and animals were as unnecessary and improb- 
able as the series of convulsions formerly imagined as 
the causes of geological change. What could those 



EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 271 

acts of creation have been? Let us try to imagine 
one. We need not dread too close an approach to 
detail. This is a world of detail ; details, in short, are 
what it consists of. Try, then, to imagine the special 
creation of a lobster. Was there ever a particular 
moment when the protein-molecules spontaneously 
rushed together from all points of the compass and 
aggregated themselves into a complicated system of 
tissues, fleshy, fatty, vitreous, and calcareous, and fur- 
thermore took on the forms of divers organs, diges- 
tive, sensitive, and locomotive, until that marvellous 
creature, the lobster, might have been seen in his per- 
fection where a moment before there was absolute 
vacancy.? One may not say that such a thing is im- 
possible, but it surely does not commend itself to the 
modern mind as altogether probable. Yet in what 
other way we are to think of special creation is not 
easy to point out, unless we are prepared to assent to 
the negro preacher who graphically described the 
Creator as moulding Adam out of damp clay and set- 
ting him up against the fence to dry. The advocates 
of special creations naturally shrank from attempts to 
clothe their hypothesis with details, and deemed it 
safer, as well as more reverent, to relegate it into the 
regions of the unknown. 

Now what Darwin did was the same sort of thing 
that Newton and Lyell had done. He asked himself 
if there was not some simple and familiar cause now 
operating to modify plants and animals which could 
be shown to have been in operation through past ages; 
and furthermore, if such a cause could not be proved 
adequate to bring about truly specific changes. We 
are familiar with the production of new breeds of 



2/2 EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 

horses and cattle, pigeons and fowl, and countless 
fruits and flowers, through human agency. How is 
this done ? Simply through selection. I need not 
follow the steps by which Darwin reached his conclu- 
sions. Selection by man could not account for the 
origin of species, but the leap of inference which Dar- 
win took from human selection to natural selection, 
the masterly way in which he proved that the survival 
of favoured individuals in the struggle for existence 
must operate as a process of selection, incessant, ubiqui- 
tous and unavoidable, so that all living things are from 
birth to death under its sway ; this was of course one 
of the most memorable achievements of the human 
mind. It was in the highest sense poetic work, intro- 
ducing mankind to a new world of thought. But let 
us not fail to observe that its scientific character lay in 
its appealing to familiar agencies to assist in interpret- 
ing the unknown. Just how far Darwin's theory of 
natural selection covered the whole ground of the phe- 
nomena to be explained is still a question. I believe 
the ultimate verdict will be that it was far from cover- 
ing the whole ground ; but it covered so much ground, 
it was substantiated and verified in such a host of 
cases, as to win general assent to the doctrine of evo- 
lution which had before i860 been accepted only by a 
comparatively few leading minds. 

In this connection let me for the thousandth time 
point out the fallacy of the common notion that we 
owe to Charles Darwin the doctrine of evolution. 
Nothing of the sort. On the other hand, there were 
large portions of the general theory of evolution 
which Darwin did not even understand. His theory 
of descent by modifications through the agency of 



EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 273 

natural selection was an immensely important contri- 
bution to the doctrine of evolution, but it should no 
more be confounded with that doctrine than Lyell's 
geology or the Newtonian astronomy should be con- 
founded with it. 

If Herbert Spencer had not lived in the nineteenth 
century, although the age would have been full of 
illustrations of evolution, contributed by Darwin and 
others, yet in all probability such a thing as the doc- 
trine of evolution would not have been heard of. 
What, then, is the central pith of the doctrine of 
evolution ? It is simply this : That the changes that 
are going on throughout the universe, so far as our 
scientific methods enable us to discern and follow 
them, are not chaotic or unrelated, but follow an intel- 
ligible course from one state of things toward another: 
and more particularly, that the course which they fol- 
low is like that which goes on during the development 
of an ovum into a mature animal. This, I say, is the 
central pith of the doctrine of evolution. It started 
in the study of embryology, a department in which 
Darwin had but little first-hand knowledge. Spen- 
cer's forerunner was the great Esthonian naturalist, 
Carl Ernest von Baer, who published in 1829 a won- 
derful book generalizing the results of observation up 
to that time on the embryology of a great many kinds 
of animals. Curiously enough, von Baer called this 
book a " History of Evolution," although neither then, 
nor at any time down to his death, was he an evolu- 
tionist in our sense of the word. So far from it was 
he that in his later years he persistently refused to 
accept Darwin's theory of natural selection. 

Now in studying the development of an individual 



2 74 EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 

ovum as exemplified in a thousand different species 
of animals, von Baer arrived at a group of technical 
formulas so general that they cover and describe with 
accuracy the series of changes that occur in all these 
cases. In other words, he made a general statement 
of the law of development for all physiological species. 
Now Spencer's great achievement was to prove that 
von Baer's law of development, with sundry modifi- 
cations, applies to the succession of phenomena in the 
whole universe so far as known to us. 

Spencer took the development of the solar system 
according to the theories of Kant and Laplace, he took 
the geologic development of the earth according to the 
school of Lyell, he took the development of plant and 
animal life upon the earth's surface according to Lin- 
naeus and Cuvier, supplemented and rectified by Hooker 
and Huxley, and he showed that all these multifarious 
and apparently unrelated phenomena have through 
countless ages been proceeding according to the very 
law which expresses the development of an individual 
embryo. In addition to this, Spencer furnished an 
especially elaborate illustration of his theory in a trea- 
tise upon psychology in which he traced the evolution 
of mind from the first appearance of rudimentary nerve 
systems in creatures as low as starfishes up to the most 
abstruse and complex operations of human intelli- 
gence, and he showed that throughout this vast region 
the phenomena conformed to his law. This was by 
far the profoundest special research that has ever been 
made on the subject of evolution, and it was published 
four years before Spencer had ever heard of Darwin's 
theory of natural selection. 

In those days Spencer's attitude toward such ques- 



EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 275 

tlons was much more Lamarckian than Darwinian; 
that is to say, he attributed far greater importance to 
such agencies as the cumulative effects of use and 
disuse than Darwin ever did ; but when Darwin's 
great work appeared, Spencer cordially welcomed 
him as a most powerful auxiliary. Spencer's next 
achievement was to point out some of the most 
essential features in the development of mankind 
as socially organized, and to make it practically 
certain that with the further advance of knowledge 
this group of phenomena also will be embraced under 
the one great law of evolution. And there was still 
one thing more which Spencer may fairly be said to 
have accomplished. The generalization of the meta- 
morphosis of forces which was begun a century ago by 
Count Rumford when he recognized heat as a mode of 
molecular motion was consummated about the middle 
of the century, when Dr. Joule showed mathematically 
just how much heat is equivalent to just how much 
visible motion, and when the researches of Helmholtz, 
Mayer, and Faraday completed the grand demonstra- 
tion that light and heat and magnetism and electricity 
and visible motion are all interchangeable one into the 
other, and are continually thus interchanging from 
moment to moment. 

Now Spencer showed that the universal process 
of evolution as described in his formula not only 
conforms to the development of an individual life as 
generalized by von Baer, but is itself an inevitable 
consequence of the perpetual metamorphosis of energy 
that was detected by the great thinkers above 
named, from Rumford to Helmholtz. Had he only 
accomplished the former part of the task, his place in 



2/6 EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 

the nineteenth century would have been that of a 
greater Kepler ; as it is, his place is undoubtedly that of 
a greater Newton. The achievement is so stupendous 
that that of Darwin is fairly dwarfed in comparison. 
Now in Spencer's law of evolution the unification of 
nature is carried to something like completeness. It 
shows us that the truth which began to be discerned 
when Newton's mind took the first great leap into the 
celestial spaces is a universal truth. It is not to be 
supposed that as yet we have more than crossed the 
threshold of the temple of science. We have hitherto 
simply been finding out the way to get the first peep 
into its mysteries ; yet in that first peep we get a 
steady gleam which assures us that all things in the 
universe are parts of a single dramatic scheme, and that 
the agencies concerned everywhere, far and near, are 
interpretable in the same way that we interpret the 
most familiar facts of daily life. Just how far the real- 
ization of this truth has affected the thought and life 
of our age in its details would be difificult to tell. It 
would be entirely incorrect to say that the unification 
of nature in the minds of thinkers of the present day 
is a consequence of Spencers generalizations. The 
correct way of stating the case would be to say that 
Spencer's generalizations give us the complete and 
scientific statement of a truth which in more or less 
vague and imperfect shape permeates the intellectual 
atmosphere of our time. 

It is not from the labours of any one thinker or from 
researches in any one branch of science that we get the 
conception of a unified nature, but it is a result of 
the resistless momentum of scientific inquiry during the 
past two centuries. Such changes in the intellectual 



EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 277 

atmosphere often work great and unsuspected results. 
Take, for example, the disappearance of the belief in 
witchcraft. From prehistoric times down to the last 
quarter of the seventeenth century the entire human 
race took witchcraft for granted ; to-day it has com- 
pletely disappeared from the thoughts of educated 
people in civilized countries. What has caused the 
change ? Probably no human belief has so much re- 
corded testimony in its favour, if we consider quantity 
merely, as the belief in witchcraft ; and certainly 
nobody has ever refuted all that testimony. Yet the 
human mind which once welcomed certain kinds of 
evidence has now become incurably inhospitable to 
them. When at Ipswich, in England, in 1664, an old 
woman named Rose Cullender muttered threats against 
a passing teamster and half an hour later his cart got 
stuck in passing through a gate, one of the most 
learned judges in England considered this sufficient 
proof that Rose had bewitched the gate, and she was 
accordingly hanged. To this kind of reasoning the 
whole community assented, except half a dozen eccen- 
tric sceptics. To-day you laugh at such so-called evi- 
dence, and your laugh shows that your mind has 
become utterly inhospitable to it. What has caused 
the change } Might it be Newton's law of gravitation ? 
Directly, perhaps, no ; yet in a certain sense, yes. 
The habit of appealing to known and familiar agencies 
instead of remote and fancied ones in order to explain 
phenomena is a habit which has been growing upon 
the civilized mind very rapidly since the seventeenth 
century, and every triumph, great and small, which that 
habit has achieved has helped to strengthen it in many 
more ways than we can detect and point out. The 



278 EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 

swift and astonishing development of science since 
Newton's time, the repeated discovery of new truths, 
the frequent invention of new industrial devices, the 
often renewed triumph of mind over matter, due sim- 
ply to that wholesome habit, has diffused it in more 
or less strength throughout all civilized communities. 
In short, we bring to the whole business of life minds 
predisposed very differently from what they were two 
centuries ago, and one of the results is the disappear- 
ance of witchcraft from our thoughts. It has not been 
crushed by a battery of arguments ; it has simply been 
dropped out in cold neglect, as a dead political issue 
is dropped out of our campaign platforms without a 
passing word of respect. 

Now with regard to some of the scientific truths, 
methods, and habits which I have alluded to as char- 
acteristic of the theory of evolution and its pioneers, 
it is obvious that they have begun to permeate the 
thought of our time in many directions. Take, for 
example, the writing of history. There was a time 
when historians dealt mainly in personal details, in the 
intrigues of courts and in battles and sieges ; when 
the study of some conspicuous personality like Luther 
or Napoleon was supposed to suffice for the under- 
standing of the historic movements of his time ; when 
it could be said of sundry decisive battles that a con- 
trary event would have essentially altered the direction 
of human development through all subsequent ages; 
when some writers even went so far as to declare that 
the biographies of all great men lumped together would 
be equivalent to a history of mankind. Throughout 
this whole school of writing you may detect that fond- 
ness for the unusual and catastrophic that used to 



EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 279 

characterize the scientific mind when untrained in 
modern methods and results. 

Now the past generation has seen the method of 
treating history quite revolutionized. In the study of 
political institutions and economic conditions we are 
endeavourins: to understand the cumulative action of 
minute but incessant causes such as we see in opera- 
tion around us. We endeavour to carry to the inter- 
pretation of past ages the experience derived from our 
own ; and knowing that nothing is more treacherous 
than hasty generalizations from analogy, we devote to 
the institutions and conditions of past ages and our 
own a study of most exacting and microscopic minute- 
ness, in order that we may guard against error in our 
conclusions. 

The result is a very considerable revolution in our 
opinions of the past and our feelings toward it, while 
an enormous mass of facts that our grandfathers 
would have called insufferably tedious have be- 
come invested for us with absorbing interest. Or, to 
cite something more immediately practical, if you 
consider the projects which men have in various 
ages entertained for reforming society, you will find 
that along with inexperience goes a naive faith that 
some sovereign decree or some act of parliament or 
some cunningly devised constitution or some happily 
planned referendum will at once accomplish the 
desired result. But cold, hard experience soon shows 
that sovereign edicts may be neglected, that it is far 
easier to make statutes than to enforce them, and that 
in such a delicate and complex structure as that of 
society the operation of laws and constitutions is liable 
to differ very widely from what was anticipated. The 



28o EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 

great difficulty of securing wise legislation is illustrated 
by the fact that in almost all statute books, nine-tenths 
of the legislation comes under the class which might 
be introduced as an act to repeal an act. Continually 
we find men asserting in one breath that human nature 
is always the same, and in the next moment Assuming 
that it may be extensively remodelled by some happy 
feat of legislation. Now the mental habits that come 
from a study of evolution lead us to very different 
views upon such matters. We can produce abundant 
evidence to show that human nature is not always the 
same, while we also recognize that it cannot be sud- 
denly or violently modified by any governmental might 
or cunning. We recognize that one must not expect 
to take a mass of poor units and organize them into an 
excellent sum total. We do not imagine that a com- 
munity of Hottentots would be particularly benefited 
by our federal constitution any more than they would 
feel comfortable in our clothes. Our experience makes 
us feel that human nature admits of very considerable 
improvement, but that this can be effected only through 
the slow and cumulative effect of countless reactions of 
individual experience upon individual character, and 
that therefore while the millennium is sure to come 
sooner or later, it can neither be bullied nor coaxed into 
coming prematurely. It seems to me that this mental 
attitude toward social reforms has been notably 
strengthened and diffused within recent years. 

A word must be said in conclusion about the effects 
of recent science upon man's view of his relation to 
the universe. To untrained minds in all ages the sub- 
stitution of a familiar and calculable agency for one 
remote and incalculable has had an atheistic look, and 



EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 28 1 

consequently it has had a tendency either to frighten 
honest inquirers or to induce their neighbours to burn 
them, and this state of things has undoubtedly been a 
drawback on the progress of mankind. It was said of 
Pythagoras that when he discovered his famous propo- 
sition about triangles which sixty generations of school- 
boys have known as the Forty-seventh in the first 
book of Euclid, he celebrated his discovery by sacri- 
ficing a hundred oxen to Apollo. " From that time to 
this," exclaims Ludwig Buechner, with a bitter sneer 
on his lips, " from that time to this, whenever a new 
truth in science is discovered, all oxen bellow with 
fright ! " For all its brutality, there is clear pith and 
humour in this remark; but it does not express the 
proper frame of mind in which to contemplate the 
narrowness of the men of bygone days. 

We ought so far to sympathize with them as to see 
that at the first glance it must have seemed very de- 
grading to be told that man's terrestrial habitat was an 
attendant upon the sun and not the sun upon the earth ; 
nor can we wonder that when Newton appealed to apple 
and sling, it should have occurred to many people that 
he was dethroning God and putting gravitation 
in His place. That sort of thing went on until 
scientific students of nature in many cases ac- 
knowledged the imputation. Being good physicists, 
but weak philosophers, they acknowledged the charge 
and retorted : " What then ? No matter what be- 
comes of religion, we must abide by the evidence 
before us ; we must follow Truth, though she lead us 
to Hades." Such was the atheistic state of mind 
illustrated by the French materialists of the eighteenth 
century, and they have had a considerable following 



282 EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 

throughout most of the nineteenth in nearly all civil- 
ized countries. One result of this state of mind was 
Comte's Philosophy of Positivism, which aimed at or- 
ganizing scientific truths without reference to any ulte- 
rior implications, which was like the ostrich burying its 
head in the sand and asseverating, " There is no world 
save that which I see." Another form which it took 
was agnosticism, or the simple, weary refusal to deal 
with subjects inaccessible to the ordinary methods of 
scientific proof. Out of this mental attitude came 
a disposition which reached its height toward the mid- 
dle of the century, to deal with sciences merely as 
groups of disconnected facts which men might gather 
and tabulate very much as boys and girls collect post- 
age stamps. The acme of glory in science would be 
thus attained when you had described some weed 
or insect hitherto unknown or undistinguished, and 
were entitled to apply to it some Greek name at which 
Aristotle would have shuddered, with your own family 
name attached, in the Latin genitive case. It was 
this feeling which led the French Academy of Sciences 
some thirty years ago to elect for a new member some 
Scandinavian naturalist, whose name I forget, instead 
of Charles Darwin, inasmuch as the former had 
described three or four new bugs while the latter 
was only a constructor of theories. In the same 
mood I remember a discussion in a certain learned 
historical society as to whether the late John Richard 
Green could properly be called a historian, inasmuch 
as he had apparently neither discovered nor edited any 
new documents, but had only described the life of a 
great people. 

Now one result of the unification of nature of which 



EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 283 

I have been speaking is that this scrappy, dry-as-dust 
method of studying things is faUing into comparative 
disfavour. It was a very prompt and striking result of 
the publication of Darwin's " Origin of Species " that 
it supplied a new stimulus to all the naturalists in the 
world. Immediately their studies of plants and ani- 
mals were brought to bear upon the question, whether 
the facts known to them tended to prove or disprove 
Darwin's views ; and they suddenly found that nature 
had become far more interesting than when studied in 
the spirit of the stamp collector. 

But still more, the vast sweep of Spencer's inquiries 
has brought it home to us at every turn that the os- 
trich method of hiding our heads and pretending that 
we see all that there is to be seen is no longer tenable. 
Many a time I have heard Spencer conclude some dis- 
cussion by saying, " Thus you see it is ever so ; there 
is no physical problem whatever which does not soon 
land us in a metaphysical problem that we can neither 
solve nor elude." In this last word we have the justifi- 
cation for those younger thinkers who are not con- 
tented to stop just where Spencer felt obliged to. As 
the startling disclosures of the past century become 
assimilated in our mental structure, we see that man is 
now justified in feeling himself as never before a part 
of nature, that the universe is no inhospitable wander- 
ing-place, but his own home ; that the mighty sweep 
of its events from age to age are but the working out 
of a cosmic drama in which his part is the leading one ; 
and that all is an endless manifestation of one all-per- 
vading creative Power, Protean in its myriad phases, 
yet essentially similar to the conscious soul within us. 
To these views Darwinism powerfully contributed 



284 EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 

when it showed the ultimate welfare of a species to be 
the chief determining factor in selecting such modifi- 
cations as would insure its survival. Darwinism 
certainly displaced many time-honoured theological 
interpretations, but at this point it brought back ten 
times as much theology as it ever displaced. So, too, 
that line of researches first set forth in my " Cosmic 
Philosophy," which exhibit man as the terminal figure 
in the long series of development, and insist upon the 
increasing subordination of material life to spiritual 
life, have the same implication. It seems to me that 
the most important effect which the doctrine of evo- 
lution is having is that of deepening and enlarging 
man's conceptions of religious truth. Forty years ago 
it would have seemed incredible that sectarian bitter- 
ness should have so greatly diminished and Christian 
charity so hopefully increased as we now see to have 
been the case, and I believe this is largely because 
in those days when science was pursued in the mood 
of the stamp collector, the religious world also was 
setting too much value upon things non-essential, 
attaching too much importance to the husks and 
integuments of religious truth rather than to its eter- 
nal spiritual essence. The change that we have seen 
has been in the direction of a life far higher and 
broader, far sweeter, more wholesome, and more hope- 
ful than of old. And for this we have largely to thank 
those methods of study that are teaching us for the 
first time how to look upon nature as an organic 
whole. 



X 

KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 



X 

KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 

Among the folk-tales which amuse our children and 
afford matter of speculation for philosophers, few are 
more widely known than the story of " The Town 
Musicians of Bremen," which is Number 27 of the 
Grimm collection, the story that tells how a party of 
robbers, who had cosily ensconced themselves in a house 
in the forest, were driven forth in a panic by the music 
of a quartet of beasts that brayed, barked, caterwauled, 
and crowed in weird and grewsome concert. The 
story is perhaps most generally known from the 
Grimm version, but it is found in one shape or another 
in all the Teutonic and Keltic parts of Europe. It 
appears as indigenous in Ireland, under the title of 
" Jack and his Comrades," where some features are 
added which bring it within the large class of stories 
relating to grateful beasts. Jack is the young hero 
who figures so conspicuously in nursery literature, who 
starts out to seek his fortune. He drags the ass out 
of a bog in which he is floundering, and afterward 
rescues the dog from some naughty boys who are 
tormenting him. The accession of the cat to the 
company is marked by no special adventure, but the 
cock is saved by the dog's prowess from the clutches 
of a red fox which is carrying it off. When they all 
reach the house in the wood, it is Jack who creeps up 

287 



288 KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 

to the window and discovers six robbers drinking 
whiskey punch. He listens to their talk, and overhears 
how they lately bagged a fine booty at Lord Dun- 
lavin's, with the connivance of the gatekeeper. The 
house is then taken by storm, as in the German ver- 
sion, and when the bravest robber returns in the dark 
he meets with a similar ill-reception. The stolen 
treasure is all found secreted in the house, and next 
morning Jack loads it on to the donkey, and they pro- 
ceed to Lord Dunlavin's castle. The treasure is 
restored, the gatekeeper is hanged, the faithful beasts 
get well provided for in the kitchen and farm-yard, and 
Jack marries the lord's only daughter, and eventually 
succeeds to the earldom. 

Taken as a whole, this fantastic story may not have 
any consistent mythological significance, but it has 
certainly been pieced together out of genuine mythical 
conceptions. It is impossible to read it without being 
reminded of the lame ass in the Zend Ya9na, who by 
his fearful braying terrifies the night monsters and 
keeps them away from the sacred homa, or drink of 
the gods. In the Veda this business of guarding the 
soma is intrusted not to an ass, but to a centaur or 
gandharva. The meaning of these creatures is well 
enough understood. The Vedic gmidharvas, corre- 
sponding to the Greek KevTavpoi, were cloud deities, 
who, among other accomplishments, were skilful per- 
formers on the kettledrum ; and their musical per- 
formances, as well as the braying of the ass in the 
Zendavesta, appear to have represented neither more 
nor less than the thunder with which Indra terrified 
the Panis, or night robbers. The ass, indeed, plays a 
considerable part in Hindu mythology ; and the pro- 



KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 289 

tection of treasure and intimidation of thieves is one 
of his regular mythical functions.^ Now when we con- 
sider the close resemblance between this function of 
the ass in Hindu mythology and the part which he 
plays in the Kelto-Teutonic legend, does it not seem 
altogether probable that this prominent idea in the 
grotesque and homely story — the idea of robbers 
frightened by a donkey's voice — had its origin in an 
Old Aryan mythical conception ? If this be the case, 
— even without considering the other members of the 
quartet, albeit they have all figured very conspicu- 
ously in divers Aryan myths, — we are bound to ac- 
count for the wide diffusion of the story by supposing 
that it is a very old tradition, and has not been passed 
about in recent times from one Aryan people to 
another. 

If our view were restricted to this story alone, how- 
ever, perhaps we could not make out a very strong 
case for it as illustrating an early community of Aryan 
tradition. It is no doubt possible, for example, that 
the story may have been originally pieced together 
out of mythical materials by some Teutonic story-teller, 
and may have been transmitted into Britain by Uncle 
Toby's armies in Flanders, or in any other of a thou- 
sand ways ; for the social intercourse between Kelts 
and Teutons has always been very close. Indeed, I 
am inclined to think that with this particular story 
such was the case. In both versions the members of 
the quartet are the very same animals, and the sequence 
of events is so closely parallel as to raise a very strong 
presumption that one was directly based upon the 
other. 

^ See Gubernatis, "Zoological Mythology," I. 370-379. 

2U 



290 



KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 



Some scholars think that we may account in this 
way for the greater part of the resemblances among 
folk-tales in different parts of Europe, and in support 
of their opinion they allege the immense popularity, in 
the Middle Ages, of the versions of the Pantcha 
Tantra and the Seven Wise Masters. But such an 
opinion seems based on altogether too narrow a view 
of the subject In the first place, the stories which 
have come into Europe through the Seven Wise Mas- 
ters and the versions of the Pantcha Tantra are but a 
drop in the bucket, when compared with the vast 
mythical lore which has been taken down from the 
lips of the common people within the last fifty years. 
For the greater part of this mythical lore no imagin- 
able literary source can be pointed out. In the second 
place, however practicable this theory of what we may 
call " lateral transmission " might seem if applied only 
to one legend, Hke the story of the donkey and his 
friends, above cited, it breaks down utterly when we 
try to apply it to the entire folk-lore of any one people. 
Granting that the Scotch and Irish Kelts may have 
learned this particular story from some German source, 
we have yet to remember that four-fifths of Scoto-Irish 
folk-lore is essentially similar to the folk-lore of Ger- 
many ; and shall we say that Scotch and Irish nurses 
never told nursery tales until they were instructed, in 
some way or other, from a German source ? We seem 
here to get very near to a reductio ad absurdum ; but 
the case is made immeasurably worse when we reflect 
that it is not with two or three but with twenty or 
thirty different Aryan peoples, and throughout more 
than a hundred distinct areas, that this remarkable 
community of popular tradition occurs. Is it in any 



KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 29I 

way credible that one of these groups of people should 
have been obliged to go to some other group to get 
its nursery tales? Or, to put the question more 
forcibly, is it at all credible that any one group should 
have been so differently constituted from the rest, in 
regard to the making of folk-lore, that it should have 
enjoyed a monopoly of this kind of invention ? Yet, 
unless we feel prepared to defend some such extreme 
position as this, there appears to be nothing for us to 
do but to admit that all the Aryan people have gone on 
from the outset with their own native folk-lore. 

Here and there, no doubt, they have acquired new 
stories from one another, and the instances of such cross- 
transmission have probably been very numerous ; but 
with regard to the great body of their fireside traditions 
we may safely assert, on general principles of common 
sense, that it has been indigenous. When we find 
that not two or three but two or three thousand 
nursery-tales are common to Ireland and Russia, to 
Norway and Hindustan, we may feel pretty sure that 
the gist of these tales, their substratum of genuine 
myth, was all contained in Old Aryan folk-lore in the 
times when there was but one Old Aryan language 
and culture. 

In support of this view we have not only this gen- 
eral probability, sustained by the difficulty of adopting 
any alternative : we have also the demonstrated fact 
that the whole structure of Aryan speech, with the 
culture that it implies, however multiform it is to-day, 
has been traced back to an era of uniformity. Quite 
independently of our study of myths and legends, we 
know that there was once a time when a part of the 
common ancestors of the Englishman, the Russian, 



292 KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 

and the Hindu formed but one single people; and 
we know that English words are like Russian and Hin- 
dustani words because they have been handed down 
by tradition from a common speech, and for no other 
reason, occult or plausible. Knowing this to be so, is 
it not obvious that the conditions of the case quite 
cover also the case of nursery tales ? Children learn 
the adventures of Little Bo-Peep and Jack the Giant- 
Killer precisely as they learn the words of their mother 
tongue ; and if the power of tradition is sufficient to 
make us say "three" in America to-day just because 
our ancesters said " tri " forty centuries ago in some 
such country as Lithuania, why should not the same 
conservative habit insure a similar duration to the 
rhymes and stories with which infancy is soothed and 
delighted ? 

Our position is further strengthened when we duly 
consider the significant fact that, great as is the num- 
ber of entirely similar stories which can be brought to- 
gether from the remotest corners of the Indo-European 
world, the number of similar mythical incidents is far 
greater. The wide diffusion of such stories as " Cin- 
derella " and " Faithful John " is in itself a striking 
phenomenon. But after all, the main point is that no 
matter how endlessly diversified the great mass of 
Aryan nursery tales may appear on a superficial view, 
they are nevertheless all made up of a few fundamental 
incidents, which recur again and again in a bewilder- 
ing variety of combinations. Thus the conception of 
grateful beasts, already noticed, appears in hundreds 
of stories, its simplest version being the familiar legend 
of Andronicus, who pulls a thorn from a lion's paw, 
and is long afterward spared by the same lion in the 



KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 293 

amphitheatre. Hardly less common is the notion of 
a man whose life depends on the duration or integrity 
of something external to him, as the existence of 
Meleagros was to be determined by the burning of a 
log. The idea of a Delilah-like woman, who by amor- 
ous wheedling extorts the secret of her lover's invul- 
nerability, is equally widespread. And the conception 
of human beings turned into stone by an enchanter's 
spell is continually repeated, from the classic victims 
of the Gorgon to the brothers of Parizade in the 
Arabian Nights. 

These elements are neatly blended in the South 
Indian legend of the magician Punchkin, who turned 
into stone six daughters of a rajah, with their hus- 
bands, and incarcerated the youngest daughter in a 
tower until she should make up her mind to marry 
him. He forgot, however, to enchant the baby son 
of this youngest daughter, who years afterward, when 
grown to manhood, discovered his mother in the 
tower, and laid a plot for Punchkin's destruction. 
The princess gives Punchkin to understand that she 
will probably marry him if he will tell her the secret 
of his immortality. After two or three futile attempts 
to hoodwink his treacherous charmer, he confesses that 
his life is bound up with that of a little green parrot 
concealed under six jars of water in the midst of a 
jungle a hundred thousand miles distant. On his 
journey thither, the young prince rescues some eaglets 
from a serpent, and they reward him by carrying him 
on their crossed wings out of the reach of the dragons 
who guard the jungle. As he seizes the parrot, Punch- 
kin roars for mercy, and immediately sets at liberty all 
the victims of the enchantment ; but as soon as this 



294 KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 

has been done the prince wrings the parrot's neck, and 
the magician dies. 

From the Deccan to Argyleshire this story is told, 
with hardly any variation, the most familiar version of 
it being the Norse tale of " The Giant who had no 
Heart in his Body." But we are now looking at these 
stories analytically, and what we have chiefly to notice 
are the ubiquity, the persistence, and the manifold re- 
combinations of the mythical incidents. These points 
are well illustrated in the Russian legend of " Marya 
Morevna," that is, " Mary, Daughter of the Sea." This 
beautiful princess marries Prince Ivan, — the everlast- 
ing Jack or Odysseus of popular tradition, whom the 
wise dawn goddess ever favours, and insures him ulti- 
mate success. Marya Morevna is an Amazon, like 
Artemis and Brynhild, and after the honeymoon is 
over the impulse to go out and fight becomes irresist- 
ible. Ivan is left in charge of the house, and may do 
whatever he likes except to look into " that closet 
there." This incident you have met with in the stories 
of " Bluebeard " and the " Third Royal Mendicant " in 
the Arabian Nights, and there is hardly any limit to its 
recurrence. Of course, the moment his wife is out of 
the house, Ivan goes straight to the closet, and there 
he finds Koshchei the Deathless, fettered by twelve 
strong chains. Koshchei pleads piteously for some 
water, as he has not tasted a drop for ten years ; but 
after the charitable Ivan has given him three bucket- 
fuls, the malignant giant breaks his chains like cob- 
webs, and flies out of the window in a whirlwind, and 
overtakes Marya Morevna, and carries her home a pris- 
oner. To recount all the adventures of Ivan while 
seeking his wife would be to encumber ourselves too 



KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 295 

heavily with mythical incident. He finds her several 
times, and carries her off; but Koshchei the Death- 
less has a magic horse, belonging to the same breed 
with Pegasus, the horses of Achilleus, the enchanted 
steed of the Arabian Nights, and the valiant hip- 
pogriff of Ariosto, and with this wonderful horse 
Koshchei always overtakes and baiBes the fugitives. 
Prince Ivan's game is hopeless unless he can find out 
where Koshchei obtained his incomparable steed. By 
dint of industrious coaxing Marya Morevna learns that 
there is a Baba Yaga, or witch, who lives beyond a 
river of fire, and keeps plenty of mares ; one time 
Koshchei tended the mares for three days without los- 
ing any, and the witch gave him a foal for his services. 
The way to get across the fiery river was to wave a 
certain magic hanckerchief, when a lofty but narrow 
bridge would instantly span the stream. Here we 
have Es-Sirat, the rainbow bridge of the Moslem, over 
which the good pass safely to heaven, while the wicked 
fall into the flames of hell below. Marya Morevna 
obtained the handkerchief, and so Ivan contrived to 
get across the river. Now comes the grateful-beast 
incident. The prince is faint with hunger, and is suc- 
cessively tempted by a chicken, a bit of honeycomb, 
and a lion's cub ; but on the intercession of the old 
hen, the queen bee, and the lioness, he refrains from 
meddling with their treasures, and arrives half starved 
at the horrible hut of the Baba Yaga, enclosed within 
a circle of twelve poles, on eleven of which are stuck 
human heads. The old hag gives him the mares to 
look after, with the friendly warning that if he loses a 
single one he needn't feel annoyed at finding his own 
head stuck on the twelfth pole. On each of the three 



296 KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 

days the mares scamper off in all directions, leaving 
Ivan in despair ; but each night they are safely driven 
home, first by a flock of outlandish birds, next by a 
lot of wild beasts, and lastly by a swarm of angry bees. 
In the dead of night Prince Ivan laid hands on a 
magic colt, and rode off on it across the fairy bridge. 
The Baba Yaga followed in hot pursuit, driving along 
in an iron mortar, brushing the trail with a broom, 
and sweeping cobwebs from the sky, like the " old 
woman, whither so high," of our own nurseries. She 
drove fearlessly on to the bridge, but when she was 
midway it broke in two, and a savage death overtook 
her in the fiery stream. Then all was up with Kosh- 
chei the Deathless, in spite of his surname ; for straight- 
way came Ivan and carried off Marya Morevna on his 
heroic steed ; and when Koshchei caught up with 
them they just cracked his skull, and built a funeral 
pyre, and burned him to ashes on it. 

Of the mythical incidents with which this wild 
legend is crowded, we must go back and pick up one 
or two which we could not conveniently notice on the 
way. We observed that Marya Morevna is like the 
Norse Brynhild in her character of an Amazon ; she is 
like her also in being separated from her lover, who 
has to go through long wanderings and many trials 
before he can recover her. The theme, with many 
variations, is most elaborately worked out in the classic 
story of Odysseus, and it is familiar to every one in the 
Arabian tales of " Beder and Johara" and of " Kama- 
ralzaman and Budoor." Another and more curious 
feature is the sudden recovery of gigantic strength by 
Koshchei the Deathless as soon as he has taken a 
drink of water. This notion is illustrated in many 



KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 297 

Aryan tales, but in none more forcibly than in the 
Bohemian story of " Yanechek ^ and the Water Demon." 
A poor widow's mischievous boy having been drowned, 
the mother some time after succeeds in capturing the 
water demon while he is out of his element, roaming 
about on land. She drags him home to her hut, 
and ties him tight with a rope nine times plaited, and 
builds a fearful fire in the oven, which so scorches and 
torments the fiend that he is prevailed upon to tell her 
how to get down into the water kingdom and release 
her Yanechek. Everything succeeds until Yanechek 
is restored to the dry land, and learns how his enemy 
is tied hand and foot in the hut. Overcome with a 
silly desire for revenge, he runs home, picks up a sharp 
hatchet, and throws it at the water demon, thinking to 
split his head open and finish him. But the horrible 
fiend, changing suddenly into a huge black dog, jumps 
aside as the axe descends, and the sharp edge falls on 
the ninefold plaited rope and severs it. The dog, freed 
from his fetters, springs to the empty water-jug stand- 
ing on the table, and thrusting in his paw succeeds in 
touching one wet drop that remained at the bottom. 
Instantly, then, the demon recovered his strength, and 
the drop of water became an overwhelming torrent, 
that swallowed up Yanechek, and his mother, and the 
house, and the region round about, and went off roar- 
ing down the hillside, leaving nothing but a dark and 
gloomy pool, which is there to this day, at that self- 
same spot in Bohemia, with the legend still hovering 
about it. 

^ The diminutive Yanechek means ''Johnny." The name of the grand 
Bohemian actress, Yzxva.y Janauschek, would seem to be equivalent to the 
English name "Johnson." 



298 KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 

These examples may suffice to illustrate what is 
meant when it is said that the thousands of stories 
which constitute the body of Aryan folk-lore are made 
up of a few mythical incidents combined in an endless 
variety of ways. The perfect freedom with which the 
common stock of mythical ideas is handled in the dif- 
ferent stories does not seem consistent with the notion 
that as a general thing one story has been copied from 
another, or handed over by any literary process from 
one people to another. On the other hand, this free- 
dom is what one would expect to find in stories passed 
from mouth to mouth, careful to preserve the scattered 
leading motives based on immemorial tradition, but 
grouping the incidents in as many fresh ways as musi- 
cians in their melodies combine the notes of the scale. 

That there has been a very large amount of copying 
and of lateral transmission I am not for a moment con- 
cerned to deny. But such lateral transmission does 
not suffice to account for the great stock of mythical 
ideas common to the civilized peoples of Europe and 
a large part of Asia. An immemorial community of 
tradition is needed for this. It has been a foible of 
many writers on mythology to apply some one favour- 
ite method of explanation to everything, to try to open 
all the doors in the enchanted castle of folk-lore with 
the same little key. Futile attempts of this sort have 
too often thrown discredit upon the study of myths 
and folk-tales. The subject is too rich in its complex- 
ity to admit of such treatment. In an essay written a 
quarter of a century ago, entitled " Werewolves and 
Swan Maidens," I tried to show how a great number 
of utterly different circumstances might combine to 
.qjenerate a single group of superstitions and tales. 



KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 299 

Euhemerism was in the main an unsound theory, but 
it surely accounts for some things. All myths are not 
stories of the Sun and the Dawn, or of the Rain-cloud 
and the Lightning, but a great many myths are. The 
solar theory explains some things, distorted history ex- 
plains others, reminiscences of savage custom explains 
others. In such complex ways, in the dim prehistoric 
dawn of human intelligence, divers mythical ideas origi- 
nated, like the personification of the sun as an archer, 
or a frog, or the lightning as a snake. These simpler 
ideas, the rudimentary elements of folk-tales, occur all 
over the world and among races in widely different 
stages of culture. They are evidently an inheritance 
from very low stages of barbarism, and their possession 
by different and remote peoples is no proof of any com- 
munity of tradition, except in so far as it shows that 
all civilized peoples have at some time or other passed 
through similar stages of barbaric thought. There is 
no reason why the simpler mythical ideas should not 
be originated independently by different people, over 
and over again. For example, the daily repetition of 
the sun's course across the sky, with very small varia- 
tion, aroused men's curiosity in a very primitive stage 
of culture. Why should that bright strong creature 
always go in the same path ? It was natural for sav- 
ages to answer such a question by inventing stories of 
some ancestral warrior that once caught the sun in a 
net or with a big hook and forced it ever afterward to 
do his bidding. Thus originated the Sun-catcher 
myths which we find in such numbers among bar- 
barous and savage peoples in America and Polynesia. 
The Greek, in his stories of Herakles performing 
superhuman tasks at the behest of Eurystheus, was 



300 KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 

working with his greater wealth of fancy at exactly the 
same problem. But the possession in common of the 
conception of the Sun as a slave or thrall in no wise 
proves community of culture between the Greek and 
the Polynesian, except in so far as it illustrates how 
the Greek came from ancestors who at some time 
passed through a stage of thinking more or less like 
that in which the Polynesian has remained. 

The resemblances between the folk-tales of civilized 
peoples are much closer, and enter much more into 
details, than the likenesses between simple mythical 
ideas which seem to be the common property of all 
races. Nobody would ever think of maintaining that 
the folk-tales of India and Scandinavia and Ireland 
had severally an independent origin. Long-continued 
community of tradition is the only cause which will 
account for the great body of the common lore. 

Let us now see how the elementary mythical inci- 
dents, out of which Aryan folk-tales are woven, are in 
many cases to be interpreted. I said a moment ago 
that all folk-tales are not nature myths, but undoubt- 
edly a good many folk-tales are. Our friend Koshchei 
the Deathless is a curious and interesting personage ; 
let us see what we can make of him. 

Between the Russian legend of Koshchei and the 
Hindu legend of Punchkin we have noted some gen- 
eral resemblances. Both these characters are mischief 
makers, with whom the hearer is not expected to sym- 
pathize, and who finally meet their doom at the hands 
of the much-tried and much-wanderinof hero of the 
story. Both carry off beautiful women, who coquet 
with them just enough to lure them to destruction. 
Such resemblances may not suffice to prove their 



KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 301 

mythologic identity, but a more specific likeness is not 
wanting. The Russian legends of Koshchei are many, 
and in one of them his life depends on an egg which 
is in a duck shut up in a casket underneath an oak 
tree, far away. In all the main incidents this version 
coincides with the story of Punchkin, up to the smash- 
ing of the egg by Prince Ivan, which causes the death 
of the deathless Koshchei. There can thus be no 
doubt that the two personages stand for the same 
mythical idea. Again, we have seen that Koshchei is 
in his most singular characteristic identifiable with the 
water demon of the Bohemian tale. In several Rus- 
sian legends of the same cycle, the part of Koshchei is 
played by a water-snake, who at pleasure can assume 
the human form. In view of the entire grouping of the 
incidents, one can hardly doubt that this serpent belongs 
to the same family with Typhon, Ahi, and Echidna, 
and is to be counted among the robber Panis, the 
enemies of the solar deity Indra, who steal the light 
and bury it in distant caverns, but are sure to be discov- 
ered and discomfited in the end. The dawn nymph — 
Marya Morevna, Daughter of the Sea, or whatever 
other name she may assume — is always true to her 
character, which is to be consistently false to the demon 
of darkness, with whom she coquets for a while, but 
only to inveigle him to destruction at the hands of her 
solar lover. The separation of the bright hero, Odys- 
seus, or Kamaralzeman, or Prince Ivan, from his 
twilight bride, and his long nocturnal wanderings in 
search of her, exposed on the way to all manner of 
perilous witchcraft, which he invariably baffles, — all 
these incidents are transparent enough in their mean- 
ing. The horrid old witch, the Baba Yaga, is in many 



302 KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 

respects the ugly counterpart of the more agreeable 
Kalypso and Kirke, or of the abominable Queen Labe 
in the Arabian tale of " Beder and Johara." The Baba 
Yaga figures very extensively in Russian folk-lore as 
a malignant fiend, and one prominent way in which 
she wreaks her malice is to turn her victims into stone. 
Herein she agrees with the Gorgon Medusa and the 
magician Punchkin. Why the fiends of darkness 
should be described as petrifying their victims is per- 
haps not obvious, until we reflect that throughout an 
immense circle of myths the powers of winter are indis- 
criminately mixed up with those of the night time, as 
being indiscriminately the foes of the sun god Zeus or 
Indra. That the demon of winter should turn its vic- 
tims into stone for a season, until they are released by 
the solar hero, is in no wise incomprehensible, even to 
our mature and prosaic style of thinking. The hero 
who successfully withstands the spell of the Gorgon, 
after many less fortunate champions have succumbed 
to it, is the indomitable Perseus, who ushers in the 
springtime. 

The malignant characteristics of Punchkin are thus, 
in the Russian tale, divided between Koshchei and 
his ally, the Baba Yaga. It is in this random, helter- 
skelter way that the materials of folk-lore are ordina- 
rily put together. But the instinct of the story-teller 
is here correct enough, for he feels that these demons 
really belong to the same family, though he cannot 
point, as the scholar can, to the associations of ideas 
which have determined what characteristics are to be 
assigned them. It cannot be too carefully borne in 
mind that the story-teller knows nothing whatever of 
the ancient mythical significance of the incidents 



KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 303 

which he relates. He recites them as they were 
told to him, in pursuance of some immemorial tra- 
dition of which nobody knows either the origin or 
the meaning. Yet in most instances the contrast 
between the good and the evil powers, between the 
god of light and warmth and comfort on the one hand 
and the fiends of darkness and cold and misery on the 
other, is so distinctly marked in the features of the 
immemorial myth that the story-teller — ignorant as 
he is of the purport of his talk — is not likely alto- 
gether to overlook it. As a general rule the attri- 
butes of Hercules are but seldom confounded with 
those of Cacus. Now and then, however, a con- 
fusion occurs, as we might expect, where there is 
no obvious reason why a particular characteristic 
should be assigned to a good rather than to an evil 
hero. In this way some of the relatively neutral 
features in a solar myth have been assigned indiffer- 
ently to the powers of light and the powers of dark- 
ness. It seems to have puzzled Max Miiller that, in 
the myth of the Trojan War, the night demon Paris 
should appear invested with some of the attributes of 
solar heroes. But I think it is natural that this should 
be so when we consider how far the myth-makers 
were from intending anything like an allegory, and 
how slightly they were bound by any theoretical con- 
sistency in the use of their multifarious materials. 
The old antithesis of the good and the bad has gener- 
ally been well sustained in the folk-lore which has de- 
scended from the myths of antiquity, but incidents not 
readily thus distinguishable have been parcelled out 
very much at random. Bearing this in mind, we have 
no difficulty in understanding why the black magician's 



304 KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 

life depends on the integrity of an egg, or some other 
such object, outside of him. In the legends we have 
been considering, it is the fiend of darkness who is 
thus conditioned, but, originally, it is beyond all ques- 
tion that the circumstance refers to the sun. Out of 
a hundred legends of this class, it is safe to say that 
ninety represent the career of the hero as bound up 
with the duration of an egg. And here, I think, we 
come close to the primitive form of the myth. This 
mysterious egg is the roc's egg which the malign 
African Efreet asked Aladdin to hang up in the dome 
of his palace. It is the sun ; and when the life of the 
sun is destroyed, as when he goes down, the life of the 
hero who represents him is also destroyed. From this 
mythical source we have the full explanation of the 
singular fate of such personages as Meleagros, and 
Punchkin, and Koshchei the Deathless. 

It is an odd feature of Koshchei that, while invari- 
ably distinguished as immortal, he is invariably slain 
by his solar adversary. But herein what have we to 
note save the fact that the night demon, though per- 
petually slain, yet rises again, and presents a bold front, 
as before, to the solar hero ? In the mythology of the 
American Indians we have this everlasting conflict 
between the dark and the bright deities. The West, 
or the spirit of darkness, contends with the East, or 
the spirit of light. The struggle begins on the moun- 
tains, and the West is forced to give ground. The 
East drives him across rivers and over mountains and 
lakes, until at last they come to the brink of this 
world. "Hold!" cries the West; "hold, my son! 
You know my power and that it is impossible to kill 
me ! " Nothing can be more transparent than the 



KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 305 

meaning of all this ; and it is in just this way that the 
deathless Koshchei is slain again and again by his 
solar antagonist. 

Conversely, among the incidents of the legend 
which we omitted as too cumbrous for citation is one 
in which Prince Ivan is chopped into small pieces by 
Koshchei, and is brought to life again only by most 
weird magic. What can be more obvious than that 
here we have the perennial conflict between Day and 
Night, — the struggle that knows no end, because both 
the antagonists are immortal .? 

As for the conception of grateful beasts, who in so 
many legends aid the solar hero in time of need, I 
think it is most likely derived from a mingling together 
of ancient myths in which the sun himself figures as a 
beast. In various ancient myths the sun is repre- 
sented as a horse or a bull, or even as a fish, — Oannes 
or Dagon, — who swims at night through a subterra- 
nean ocean from the west, where he has disappeared, 
to the east, whence he is to emerge. The cock is also, 
quite naturally, a solar animal, and his cheerful crow 
is generally the signal at which ghosts and night 
demons depart in confusion. In popular legends, in 
which these primitive connections of ideas have been 
blurred and partially forgotten, we need not be sur- 
prised to find these and other solar beasts assisting 
the solar hero. 

The beast, on the other hand, who enlists his ser- 
vices in support of the powers of darkness is usually a 
wolf, or a serpent, or a fish. In many legends the sun 
is supposed to be swallowed by a fish at nightfall, and 
cast up again at daybreak ; and in the same way the 
wolf of darkness devours little Red Riding Hood, the 



306 KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 

dawn nymph, with her robe of crimson twilight, and, 
according to the German version, yields her up whole 
and sound when he is cut open next day. But the 
fish who devours the sun is more often a water-snake, 
or sea-dragon, and we have seen that Koshchei the 
Deathless is connected by ties of kinship with these 
mythical animals. In the readiness with which Kosh- 
chei and the water fiend of the Bohemian legend 
undergo metamorphosis we are reminded of the clas- 
sic Proteus. But in the suddenness with which their 
giant strength is acquired we seem to have a reminis- 
cence of the myth of Hermes, the god of the winds in 
the Homeric Hymn, who, while yet an infant in the 
cradle, becomes endowed with giant powers, and works 
mischief with the cloud cattle of Apollo, retreating 
afterward through the keyhole, and shrinking back 
into his cradle with a mocking laugh. This mythical 
conception duly reappears in the Arabian story of the 
Efreet whom the fisherman releases from a bottle, who 
instantly grows into a gigantic form that towers among 
the clouds. 

Thus in these curious stories, to which our children 
listen to-day with breathless interest, we have the old 
mythical notions of primitive people most strangely 
distorted and blended together. We may fairly regard 
them as the alluvial refuse which the stream of tradi- 
tion has brought down from those distant highlands of 
mythology where our primeval ancestors recorded their 
crude and childlike impressions of the course of natural 
events. Out of the mouths of babes comes wisdom ; 
and so from this quaint medley of nursery lore we 
catch glimpses of the thoughts of mankind in ages 
of which the historic tradition has utterly vanished. 



INDEX 



Abenaki Indians, the, 92. 
Abercronibie, General, attacks Fort 

Ticonderoga, iio-lll. 
Abingdon, chronicles of, 8. 
Adams, John, quoted concerning the 

Boston tea party, 195. 
Adams, Samuel, 173, 178, 189, 190, 

191. 193- 

" Advisableness of Improving Natural 
Knowledge, The," Huxley's, 201. 

^schylus, rank of, as a poet, 67. 

Ages, the Carboniferous, Jurassic, and 
Eocene, 263-265. 

"Agnostic," Huxley originates the epi- 
thet, 210. 

Aix-la-Chapelle, treaty of, 105. 

Alaska, a native artist in, 20. 

Albany, cause of founding of, 129 ; the 
congress at (1754), 169. 

Algonquins, the, 92-93 ; alliance be- 
tween the French and the, 96. 

"America's Place in History," Dr. 
Fiske's, 126; quoted, 137 n., 145 n., 
147 n., 149 n., 151 n., 154 n. 

Amherst, General Jeffrey, III, 112, 

"3- 

Andastes, the, 92. 

Andokides, 7. 

Arabian Nights, references to tales in 

the, 293, 294, 295. 
Archives, increased facility of access to 

national, 9. 
" Areopagitica," Milton's, 62. 
Aristophanes, 7. 
Aristotle, 15. 
Arnold, Matthew, 232. 
Art and religion, Milton's view of, 46. 
Ass, the, in Hindu mythology, 288-289. 
Atlantosaurus, the, 263-264. 



Atonement, Pynchon's treatise on the, 

145. 
Attucks, Crispus, the Boston monument 

to, 163-164. 
Aubrey, John, 40. 

B 

Baba Yaga, the, 295-296, 301-302. 
Baer, Carl Ernest von, influence of 

work of, on Spencer, 222, 273-274. 
Baldwin, Abraham, in the constitutional 

convention at Philadelphia, 159. 
Bancroft, George, 20. 
Barnet, Gilbert, " History of the Ref- 
ormation " by, II. 
Barre, Colonel, 113. 
Bastian, Dr., on spontaneous generation, 

244-245. 
Bedford, Gunning, anti-federalist speech 

of, in constitutional convention, 158. 
Beecher, Henry Ward, 5. 
Belfast Address, Tyndall's, 200, 246. 
Black, Joseph, discovery of latent heat 

by, 254. 
Body of Liberties, the Massachusetts, 

133. 140. 
Boleyn, Anne, 4, 

Boston Massacre, the, 163-164, 185. 
Boston, tea-ships at, 188-194. 
Bouquet, Henry, 112, I20. 
Braddock's defeat, 106-109. 
Bradford, William, 14, 131. 
Bradford manuscript, the, 14. 
Braintree, Mass., founding of, 140. 
Bramford, Long Island, settlement of, 

Brodie, Sir Benjamin, 202, 
Bruce, Robert, 4. 

Brynhild, analogy between Marya 
Morevna and, 294, 296. 



307 



3o8 



INDEX 



Buckle, Henry Thomas, 24. 

Buechner, Ludwig, Huxley's disapproval 
of, 211; quoted concerning Pythag- 
oras's sacrifice of oxen, 281. 

Bureau of Ethnology, the Washington, 

30-31- 
Bushy Run, battle of, 120. 



Cambridge University in Milt on's day, 41 . 

Carlovingians, period in history of the, 
28. 

Carlyle, Thomas, 9, 24, 235. 

Catastrophism, theory of, 264-265 ; 
overthrown by Lyell, 265-266. 

Cayuga Indians, the, 93, 94. 

Champlain, Samuel de, 88, 95-96, 

Chancery records, lack of care in pre- 
servmg, lO-ii. 

Charleston, tea-ships at, 188-189. 

Charlevoix, the Jesuit historian, loi. 

Cherokees, the, 92. 

Chickasaws, the, 92. 

Children, bounties on, in French colo- 
nies, 86. 

Choctaws, the, 92. 

Clarendon, Earl of, 63. 

Cobbler of Agawam, the, 133, 140. 

Commines, J2. 

Committees of correspondence, 189-190. 

Comte, Auguste, Philosophy of Posi- 
tivism of, 203, 282. 

" Comus," 45-46. 

Conestoga, the sack of, 118. 

Congreve, controversy of Huxley with, 
on scientific aspects of Positivism, 
203, 

Connecticut, settlement of, by men from 
Massachusetts, 142-145 ; common- 
wealth of, created, 146-147; consti- 
tution of (Fundamental Orders), 
146-149 ; constitution of, compared 
to that of New Haven, 153 ; annex- 
ation of New Haven by, 155-156; 
part played by, in formation of fed- 
eral constitution of United States, 
156--159. 

" Conspiracy of Pontiac," Parkman's, 
120, 126. 

Constantinople in history, 29. 



Constitution of Athens, Aristotle's, 15. 

Cook, James, 113. 

Copernicus, 259. 

" Cosmic Philosophy," Dr. Fiske's, 204, 

284. 
Cotton, John, 130, 132, 134, 138, 141, 

150. 
Coues, Dr., 127. 
Courtemanche, General, invasion of 

Mohawk country by, 102. 
Crayfish, the, Huxley's work on, 226. 
Creek Indians, the, 92. 
Cromwell, Oliver, 19, 25, 60, 61-62, 63. 
Cullender, Rose, 277. 
Curtius, Ernst, history of Greece by, 27, 
Cutler, Manasseh, letters of, 13. 



D 



Dante, rank of, among the great poets> 
66. 

Darwin, Charles, confession of, to liking 
for falsifying when a child, 17; the 
"Origin of Species," 201, 283; 
similarity between beginnings of 
Huxley's career and that of, 220; 
Huxley's support of, 224-225; the 
theory of Natural Selection, 271; 
not the originator of the doctrine of 
evolution, 272-273; rejected for 
membership in the French Academy 
of Sciences, 282. 

Davenport, John, 150, 151, 152, 156. 

Dawn, myths which are stories of the, 
299. 305-306. 

" Decline and Fall of the Roman Em- 
pire," Gibbon's, 3;^, 37-38. 

Deerfield massacre, the, 104. 

" Defence of the English People," Mil- 
ton's, 61. 

" Defence of the King," Salmasius', 60- 
61. 

Delaware Indians, the, 92,95, 116, 120. 

Dentreath, Dolly, 268. 

" Diary and Letters of Thomas Hutch- 
inson," 163. 

Dickinson, John, letters of, 13. 

Dinosaurs, the, 264. 

Dinwiddle, Governor Robert, 106, 166. 

Dipper, an unknown article in England, 
217. 



INDEX 



309 



" Discovery of America," Dr. Fiske's, 

12, 252. 
Disraeli, Benjamin, Huxley on, 208. 
Dog, the, Huxley's projected book on, 

226. 
Dorchester, Mass., 136, 138, 139, 143. 
Dustin, Hannah, 99-ior. 

E 

East India Company, George III.'s 
arrangement with, as to tea for 
Americans, 187-188. 

Eaton, Theophilus, 150. 

Ecuyer, Captain, 90-91. 

Edict of Nantes, effect on France of 
revocation of, 78-80. 

Edward I., differing views of, 4-5. 

" Eikon Basilike," the, 60. 

" Eikonoklastes," the, 60. 

" Elegy written in a Country Church- 
yard," an appreciative view of, 115. 

Eliot, John, 139. 

Ellsworth, Oliver, 158, 

Empire of the East, Roman, historical 
importance of, underrated, 29. 

Engine, the steam, invention of, marks 
an epoch in evolution of civilization, 
254-256. 

England, misconception as to form of 
government of, as compared with 
that of United States, 25. 

Erasmus, 43. 

Erckmann-Chatrian, 79. 

Erie Indians, the, 92, 94. 

" Essai sur les Moeurs," Voltaire's, 32. 

Euripides, 15. 

Evarts, William M., 229 n. 

Evesham, chronicles of, 8. 

" Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature," 
Huxley's, 200-201. 

Evolution, law of, discovered by Spen- 
cer, 222, 273-276; Tyndall's con- 
nection with exposition of doctrine 
of, 245-246; Darwin not the author 
of, 272-273. 

Ewald, 8n.; quoted, lo-ii. 



Fairfield, Conn., settlement of, 151 n. 
Faraday, Michael, 243, 244, 275. 



Filsor Club of Kentucky, the, 127. 
" Finding of Wineland, The," Reeves's, 
16. 

" First Principles," Spencer's, 199-200. 

Five Nations, the, 92; aUiance between 
the English and, 96. 

Florida, discovery of an old map of, 13. 

Folk-lore, Scoto-Irish, German, and 
Aryan, 290-291. 

Forbes, General, capture of Fort Du- 
quesne by, 112. 

Fort Duquesne, built by the French, 
106; Braddock's expedition against, 
106-109; captured by the English, 
112; Franklin obtains horses for 
expedition against, 167. 

Fort Loyal, massacre of, 99. 

Fort Pitt, Captain Ecuyer's experience 
at, 90-91; Fort Duquesne becomes, 
112. 

Fort William Henry, Montcalm de- 
stroys, 1 10. 

Foster, Michael, at the Huxleys', 217. 

France, misconception as to United 
States' form of government and that 
of, 25-26 ; effect on, of persecution 
of Huguenots, 78-So. 

Franklin, Benjamin, Braddock's remarks 
to, 107 ; gives advice to anti-Indian 
rioters, 1 19; secures horses for 
Braddock's expedition, 167 ; at 
Albany congress of 1754, 169-170. 

Frederick the Great, 109. 

Freeman, Edward A., 4, 22, 24; as a 
lecturer in America, 246. 

Freuden-Berger, 5. 

Froissart, 32. 

Frontenac, Count, 90, 97-98, 102-103, 
166. 

Froude, James A., 3, 24. 

"Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, 
The," 146-149. 



Gage, General Thomas, 107. 

Galileo, Milton's visit to, 56. 

Gandharvas, the Vedic, 288. 

Gardiner, Rawson, 9. 

Gates, Horatio, 107. 

Gauden, Dr., the " Eikon Basilike ' ' of, 60. 



3IO 



INDEX 



Geneva, Milton at, 57. 

George III., beginning of reign of, 175 
-176 ; opposed to Parliamentary re- 
form, 1 79 ; forces a quarrel with the 
Americans, 180-184; "trying the 
question " with America, 187-188. 

Georgia, the deciding vote of, in forma- 
tion of federal constitution, 159. 

Gessler, no such person as, in history, 5. 

Gibbon, Edward, 32-33, 37-38. 

Gladstone, W. E., Huxley's opinion of, 
208-209 ; controversy of, with Her- 
bert Spencer, 208-209. 

Goethe, 37, 43, 67. 

Goodell, Abner C, 164, 165. 

Gorton, Samuel, 135, 154. 

Governors, royal, question of salaries of, 
182-183. 

Great Meadows, battle of, 106. 

" Greatest of all the Plantagenets, The," 
Seeley's, 4. 

Greece, histories of, 26-27, '^5- 

Green, John Richard, 23-24, 218, 282; 
report by, of Wilberforce-Huxley 
encounter, 202-203. 

Gregory of Tours, 32. 

Grenville, George, becomes British 
prime minister, 1 71. 

Grote, George, 26-27. 

Groton, massacre at, 99. 

Guilford, Conn., settlement of, 151. 

Guizot, F. P. G., 9. 



H 



Hall, Robert, 5. 

Hamilton, Lord Qaud, 200, 248. 

Hancock, John, a participant in Boston 
tea party, 194. 

Harrison, Frederic, at the Huxleys', 218. 

Hartford, settlement of, 143-144; first 
General Court of Connecticut held at 
(1637), 146; constitution of com- 
monwealth of Connecticut framed 
and adopted at, 146-149. 

Harvard College, autograph of Milton 
in library of, 57; the iron cross over 
entrance to library of, 105; found- 
ing of, 144. 

Haverhill, Mass., Indian outrages at, 
99. 104- 



Hawes, George Robert Twelves, 194. 

Hawke, Sir Edward, in, 112. 

Haynes, John, 139. 

Heat, radiant, Tyndall's work on sub- 
ject of, 245; latent, Joseph Black's 
discovery of, 254. 

" Heat considered as a Mode of Mo- 
tion," Tyndall's, 245. 

Heilprin, Angelo, 207-208. 

Helmholtz, 245, 275. 

Hemans, Mrs. Felicia, 130, 131. 

Henry VIII., old and new views of, 3-4. 

Henry, Patrick, 13, 173, 178. 

" Herbert Spencer on the Americans, 
and the Americans on Herbert 
Spencer," Youmans', 229 n. 

Hermes, the myth of, 306. 

Herodotus, 31. 

Hildebrand, 28. 

History, Greek origin of the word, 23. 

" History of England," Hume's, 33. 

" History of England," Milton's pro- 
jected, 65. 

" History of the English People," 
Green's, 23-24. 

" History of Evolution," von Baer's, 273. 

" History of Greece," Grote's, 26-27. 

" History of Greece," Mitford's, 26, 165. 

"History of the Old South Church," 
Hill's, 14. 

" History of Plymouth," Bradford's, 14. 

" History of the Reformation," Barnet's, 
II. 

" History of Rome," Mommsen's, 27. 

Hooker, Joseph D., 213. 

Hooker, Thomas, 125, 1 39-141, 142, 

145- 
Horses, historic importance of domesti- 
cation of, 251-252, 257. 
Horton, Milton's home at, 44, 57. 
Howard, Catherine, 4. 
Howe, General, and Charles Lee, 14. 
Howe, Lord, slain at battle of Ticon- 

deroga, no. 
Howe, Sir William, in expedition against 

Quebec, 113. 
Huguenots, persecution of, in France, 

78-80. 
Hume, David, superficial and careless 

work of, 33; Huxley's regard for, 

210. 



INDEX 



311 



Huron Indians, the, 92, 94, 117. 

Hutchinson, Anne, 135, 136, 142. 

Hutchinson, '1 homas, Diary and Letters 
of, 13, 163; and the question of tea- 
ships at Boston, 189-193. 

Hutchinson Mob, the, 173, 184. 

Hutchinsons, the younger, 189, 192. 

Huxley, Leonard, memoir of T, H. 
Huxley by, 199. 

Huxley, Thomas Henry, on " Paradise 
Lost " and the popular theory of 
creation, 65-66; memoir of, Leon- 
ard Huxley's, 199; encounter with 
the Bishop of Oxford, 201-203; 
family life of, 204-205, 217-218; 
wonderful erudition of, 205-208; 
views of Disraeli, Louis Napoleon, 
and Gladstone, 208-209; attitude 
of, toward belief in a future life, 21 1- 
213; death of, 219; sketch of 
scientific career of, 220-224; friend- 
ship of, with Tyndall and Spencer, 
243- 



Illinois Indians, the, 92. 

" II Penseroso," 46, 48-50. 

India House at Seville, records of the, 
12. 

Indians, tact of the French in managing 
the, 90-91 ; divisions of North 
American, 91-93; outrages perpe- 
trated by, 98-101, 104, 1 1 7-1 18; the 
everlasting conflict between dark 
and bright deities in mythology of, 
304-305. 

Inquisition, establishment of, in Spain, 

77- 
Intendant, the, in Canada, 83-85. 
Iron, smelting of, stage in evolution of 

society marked by, 253. 
Iroquois, the, 92-96; the Long House 

of, 93-94; defeated by Algonquins 

under Frontenac, 102-103. 
Italy, Milton in, 56-57. 



J 



*' Jack and his Comrades," 287-288. 
Jackson, Hughlings, 204. 



Janauschek, Fanny, 297 n. 

Jansen, Cornelius, 39. 

Jesuit Relations, the, 88, loi, 127-128. 

Jesuits, the, in America, 88-89, 94- 

Jogues, the Jesuit, 88. 

Johns Hopkins University historical 

studies, 127. 
Johnson, General, no, 113, 120. 
Johnson, Sir William, 103-104, n6, 
Johnson, William Samuel, 158. 
Johnson Hall, 72, 104. 
Jonson, Ben, 45. 



K 



Kant, Immanuel, Huxley's preference 

of Hume to, 211. 
Kepler, 259, 260. 
Kickapoo Indians, the, 92. 
King, Edward, 51, 52. 
King Philip's War, 116-II7. 
Kingsley, Charles, letter from Huxley to, 

quoted, 212. 
Kopp, the Swiss historian, 5. 
Koshchei the Deathless, the legend ot 

294-296, 300-302, 304-305. 



" L' Allegro," 46-48, 50. 

Lallemant, the Jesuit, 88. 

Land Bank, the Massachusetts, 170. 

Langlade, Charles de, 108. 

Lankester, Ray, at the Huxleys', 217. 

La Salle, Robert de, 94, 97, 98. 

Las Casas, Bartolome de, 32. 

Laud, Archbishop, 53, 57, 139. 

Lawes, Henry, 45. 

" Lectures on the Origin of Species," 
Huxley's, 200-201. 

Lee, Charles, 13-14. 

" Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Star- 
craft of England," 8. 

Lejeune, the Jesuit chronicler, 88. 

Lewes, George Henry, 204, 210, 247. 

" Life and Letters," Darwin's, quoted, 17. 

" Life of Milton," Masson's, 37. 

" Limits of Religious Thought," Man- 
sel's, 210. 

Literature, pseudonymous, 18. 

Littre, the French philosopher, 79. 



312 



INDEX 



Long House, the, of the Iroquois, 93-94. 
Longfellow, Henry W., sheds new light 

on character of Cotton Mather, 20- 

21. 
Louis XIV., expulsion of Huguenots by, 

78-80 ; and his American colonies, 

Louis Napoleon, Huxley's opinion of, 208. 
Louisburg, fortress of, taken by New 

Englanders, 104-105 ; captured by 

General Amherst, 1 12. 
Louisiana purchase, the, 121. 
Lowell, James Russell, 44. 
Lubbock, Sir John, 204, 247. 
Lucretius, 67. 

Ludlow, Roger, 142, 145, 151 n. 
" Lycidas," 50-55. 
Lyell, Sir Charles, Darwin's regard for 

opinion of, 225 ; theory of catastro- 

phism overthrown by, 265-267. 
Lysias, 7. 

M 

.Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 7, 9, 64. 
Machiavelli, 32. 
Macmillan, Alexander, 216. 
Madison, James, work of, in constitu- 
tional convention at Philadelphia, 

157- 

Mahaffy, J. P., the works of, 27. 

Maine, Sir Henry, writings of, on juris- 
prudence, 30. 

Maisonneuve, the Jesuit, 88. 

Malesherbes, 79. 

Malmesbury, chronicles of, 8. 

Mansel, Dean, Huxley's description of, 
210-211. 

Manso, Marquis, Milton the guest of, 
at Naples, 56. 

Map of Florida, discovery of an old, 13. 

Marble, Manton, 203. 

Mary Tudor, burning of heretics in reign 
of, 80. 

Marya Morevna, the legend of, 294-296. 

Mask, the Elizabethan, 45. 

Mason, George, letters of, 13. 

Massachusetts Bay colony, originally 
a commercial company, 131-132; 
character of political and religious 
views in, I3.'3-I33; becomes a self- 



governing republic, 136-137; exodus 
from, to Connecticut, 142-144. 

Massacre of Piedmont, Milton's sonnet 
on, 62. 

Massacres, Indian, 98-101, 104; in 
Pontiac's war, 11 7- 11 8. 

Masson, David, 37, 39, 63, 64. 

Mather, Cotton, true attitude of, in 
Salem witchcraft trials, 20-21. 

Maverick, John, 141-142. 

Mayflower compact, the, 147 n. 

Mermaid Tavern, the, 39. 

Miami tribe of Indians, the, 92, 94, 95. 

Michael Angelo, genius of, more uni- 
versal than that of Milton, 37. 

Migne, Abbe, 8. 

Milford, Conn., settlement of, 15 1. 

Milton, John (the elder), 38-39, 40, 44, 
56. 

Milton, John, family of, 38; birth of, 39; 
portraits of, 39; at Cambridge Uni- 
versity, 41-43; hfe at Horton, 44; 
" Comus," 45-46; " L' Allegro " and 
"II Penseroso," 46-50; "Lycidas," 
50-55; trip on the Continent, 55- 
57; a Root-and-Branch man, 58; 
marriage, 58; Latin secretary under 
the Commonwealth, 60; " Defence 
of the English People," 6l; " Areo- 
pagitica," 62; death of second wife, 
62; blindness, 63; third wife, 63; 
death, 65. 

Milton, Richard, 38. 

Mitford, William, example of a preju- 
diced historian, 26, 165. 

Mohawk tribe of Indians, the, 93. 

Mohegan Indians, the, 92, 129. 

Mommsen, Theodor, 27. 

Montagu, Admiral, at Boston tea party, 
194. 

Montcalm, Marquis de, no, 113-115. 

More, Sir Thomas, 3. 

Morgan, Lewis, 30. 

Moriscoes, expulsion of, from Spain, 77. 

Morris, Gouverneur, letters of, 13. 

Miiller, Max, 303. 



N 



Narragansett Indians, the, 92, 129. 
Naseby, battle of, 59. 



INDEX 



313 



Natchez Indians, the, 92. 

Natick Indians, the, 129. 

Natural Selection, theory of, 271-272. 

Neutral Nation, the, 92, 94. 

New England confederation of 1643, 
154. 

New Haven, founding of, 150-151; early 
constitution of, 152-153; annexa- 
tion of, to Connecticut, 155-156. 

New London, Conn., colony established 
at, 152 n. 

New Netherland, character of growth 
of, 129. 

Newton, Sir Isaac, 259-260, 281; Her- 
bert Spencer termed a greater, 
276. 

New Town, the (Cambridge), 136, 137, 
138, 140, 142, 144. 

New Whigs, the, 174, 178. 

New York, tea-ships at, 188-189. 

New York congress of 1765, 178. 

Nipmuck Indians, the, 129. 

North, Lord, character of, 181 ; suc- 
ceeds Townshend as George III.'s 
minister, 184; proposes repeal of 
Revenue Act, 186. 



O 



*' Objective Method and Verification," 
Lewes's, 210. 

Ohio Company, the, 106. 

Ojibwa tribe of Indians, the, 92, 93. 

Old Sarum, 176. 

Old South Church, Boston, Hill's history 
of, 14; a famous town-meeting in, 
192-193. 

Old Whigs, the, 174, 176, 179. 

Oneida Indians, the, 93, 94, io2. 

Onondaga Indians, the, 93, 102. 

"Origin of Species," Darwin's, 201, 
283. 

Osborne, Admiral, in. 

Ottawa Indians, the, 92, 94. 

Oviedo, recovery of first folio of, 14- 
15- 

Owen, Richard, Huxley's controversy 
with, on true nature of the verte- 
brate skull, 224. 

Oxen, historic importance of domesti- 
cation of, 251-252, 257. 



Pantcha Tantra, the, 290. 

" Paper and Parchment," Ewald's, 8 n., 

lO-II. 

" Paradise Lost," 55, 56, 63-66. 

" Paradise Regained," 66. 

Paris, peace of, 120-122, 166. 

Parkman, Francis, 120, 126. 

Parkman Qub of Milwaukee, the, 127. 

Paston Letters, the, 12-13. 

Pattison, Mark, quoted concerning Mil- 
ton, 45-46, 62 ; at the Huxleys', 
218. 

Paxton, Pa., anti-Indian headquarters at, 
118-119. 

Peabody, Andrew Preston, 163-164, 
165. 

Pennsylvania, reason of freedom of, from 
Indian troubles, 95 ; massacres in, 
during Pontiac's war, 11 7-1 18; con- 
troversies arising from the massacres, 
1 18-120 ; character of growth of, as 
a colony, 129. 

Pepperell, William, 105. 

Pequot tribe of Indians, the, 92, 95, 129, 
154. 

Pequot River, the, name changed to 
Thames, 152 n. 

" Persistence of force," Spencer's phrase, 
suggested by Huxley, 200. 

Philadelphia, tea-ships at, 188-189. 

Phillips, George, 142. 

Phips, Sir William, loi. 

Photography, reproduction of old parch- 
ments by means of, 15-16. 

Pinzon, the younger, historical point 
concerning, 12. 

Pitt, William, 109, 112, 177, 178. 

Plato, 7, 49. 

Plutarch, 32. 

Plymouth colony, comparative religious 
tolerance in, 131. 

Pococke, Admiral, in. 

Poets, Milton's rank among the first 
nine, 66-67. 

Pollock, Sir Frederick, 207, 218. 

Polybius, 32. 

Pontiac, conspiracy of, 1 16-120, 126, 
167, 170, 171. 

Porter, Jane, 4. 



314 



INDEX 



Portsmouth, the founding of, 135. 
Positivism, the philosophy of, 203, 282. 
Pottawatomies, an Indian tribe, 92. 
Powell, Major J. W., 30. 
Powell, Mary (Mrs. John Milton), 58- 

59- 
Powell, Richard, 58. 
Prefects, government by, 82-87. 
Priestley, Dr. Joseph, 258. 
Prince, Rev. Thomas, 14. 
Prynne, William, lo-ii. 
Punchkin, the story of, 293-294, 3CX>- 

302, 304-305. 
Pynchon, William, 145. 
Pythagoras, story of sacrifice of oxen by, 

281. 



Quakers, controversy between Pennsyl- 
vania Presbyterians and, 119. 

Quebec, taken from the French by the 
English, 1 13-1 15. 

Quiberon, defeat of French fleet off, 
112. 

Quincy, Josiah, warns Bostonians against 
rash acts in the tea-ship agitation, 
192-193. 



R 



Ranke, Leopold von, 9. 
Reeves, Arthur Middleton, 16. 
Reform, Parliamentary, 178-179. 
Revenue Act, the Townshend-North, 

181-184, 186. 
Revere, Paul, a participant in Boston 

tea party, 194. 
Robinson, John, 131. 
Rockingham, Lord, becomes British 

prime minister, 173. 
Rodney, Admiral, 112. 
Romilly, Lord, 11. 
Root-and-Branch men, 57-58. 
Rosse, Lord, remarks by, in giving Royal 

medal to Huxley, 221. 
Rotch, Francis, 192. 
Rotten boroughs, English, 176, 178. 
Rumford, Count, 256-257, 275. 
Rutherford, Samuel, 133. 
Ryswick, peace of, 103. 



St. Albans, chronicles of, 8. 

Sainte-Beuve, 6. 

Salem witchcraft, part taken by Cotton 
Mather in, 20-21. 

Salmasius, " Defence of the King " by, 
60-61. 

Salmon Falls, massacre of, 99. 

" Samson Agonistes," 66. 

Sanskrit, study of, 30. 

Saxo Grammaticus, 5. 

Saybrook, Conn., founded, 151 n. 

Schenectady, massacre of, 98-99, 125. 

Schuyler, Peter, 102. 

" Scottish Chiefs, The," 4. 

Seeley, Robert, 4. 

Selection, Natural, Darwin's theory of, 
271-272. 

Seminole Indians, the, 92. 

Seneca Indians, the, 93, 94, 117, 120. 

Seven Wise Masters, the, 290. 

Seven Years' War, the, 109. 

Shakespeare, 32, 37, 38, 39, 45, 66. 

Shawnee Indians, the, 92, 95, 120. 

Shepard, Thomas, 144. 

Sherman, Roger, 158. 

Shirley, Governor William, 104-105, 171. 

Sime, James, 216. 

" Simple Cobbler of Agawam," the, 133, 
140. 

Six Nations, the, 92, 103. 

" Soapy Sam " incident, the, 201-203. 

Soldiers, colonial, in Louisburg expedi- 
tion, 104-105; in old French war, 
III. 

Sonnets, Milton's Italian, 56; Milton's, 
on Vane, Cromwell, and the Mas- 
sacre of Piedmont, 62. 

Sophocles, 67. 

Southold, Long Island, settlement of, 

Spain, effect on, of expulsion of the 
Moriscoes and establishment of the 
Inquisition, 77-78. 

Sparks, Jared, and Washington's letters, 

19- 
Spencer, Herbert, association of, with 
Huxley and Tyndall, 199-200, 243; 
" an expert in gastronomy," 204, 
247; as a reader of books, 205-206; 



INDEX 



315 



Gladstone's controversy with, 208- 
209; formulation of doctrine of 
evolution wholly due to, 222, 273- 
276; Dr. Fiske's address at farewell 
banquet to, 229-237; similarity of 
early life of, and Tyndall's, 241. 

Spinoza, Huxley's fondness for, 207. 

Spontaneous Generation, the Tyndall- 
Bastian controversy on, 244-245. 

Springfield, Mass., founding of, 145. 

Stamford, Conn., settlement of, 151. 

Stamp Act, Grenville's, 171-174; Town- 
shend's, 181-184. 

Stevens, Benjamin, 16. 

Stone, Samuel, 125, 139. 

Strachey, Sir Henry, 14. 

Strafford, Earl of, 57. 

Stratford, Mass., settlement of, 15 1 n. 

Stuarts, expulsion of the, 7; effect on 
America of, 98-103. 

Sumner, Charles, 57. 

Sun, myths which are stories of the, 
299-300, 305-306. 

Sun-catcher myths, 299. 

Susquehannock Indians, the, 92, 94. 



Tacitus, 32. 

" Tall teas," the Huxleys', 204-205, 217- 
218, 247. 

Tea party, the Boston, some of the par- 
ticipants in, 193-194. 

Tell, William, story of, exploded, 5. 

Thames River, name changed from 
Pequot to, 152 n. 

Theocritus, 50, 54. 

Thompson, Benjamin (Count Rumford), 
256-257, 275. 

"Through Nature to God," Dr. Fiske's, 
quoted, 231 n. 

Thucydides, 7, 18-19, 3^> 32. 

Ticonderoga, battle of, iio-iii. 

"Titled bride," Huxley's, 200, 248. 

Tobacco, commercial basis of Old Vir- 
ginia the exportation of, 128. 

Tower of London, as storehouse for 
records, lo-ii. 

"Town-meeting principle," the, 81-82. 

"Town Musicians of Bremen, The," 
287. 



Townshend, Charles, character of, i8i; 
as George III.'s lieutenant in struggle 
with the Americans, 182-183; death 
of, 184. 

Trilobites, the, 265. 

Troops, numbers of, furnished by colo- 
nies for Louisburg expedition, 104- 
105; colonial, in old French war, 
III. 

Tuscarora tribe of Indians, 92, 103. 

Tweed, Boss, analogy between George 
III.'s attitude and that of, 188. 

Tylers, the, letters of, 13. 

Tyndall, John, birth and early life of, 
241 ; attends German universities, 
242; becomes Fellow of Royal So- 
ciety and Professor of Physics in the 
Royal Institution, 242-243; friend- 
ship of Spencer, Huxley, and, 243 ; as 
a climber, 243-244; succeeds Faraday 
as Director of the Royal Institution, 
244; controversy on Spontaneous 
Generation, 244-245; work of, on 
radiant heat, and in exposition of 
doctrine of evolution, 245-246; as a 
lecturer in America, 246; in private 
life, 247; marriage, 248. 



U 



Unification of nature, the, 258, 260-264. 
Uniformitarianism, the so-called theory 

of, 266-267. 
Unitarian, Milton as a, 66. 
" Unseen World," Dr. Fiske's, 212 n. 
Utrecht, treaty of, 105. 



Vane, Sir Henry, 63; Milton's sonnet 

on, 62. 
Vatican library, 12. 
Vico, G. B., effort of, to make history 

scientific, 32. 
Virgil, 50, 65, 67. 

Virginia, character of, as a colony, 128. 
Voltaire, 32. 
Volunteers, colonial, in expedition 

against Louisburg, 104-105. 



3i6 



INDEX 



W 



Wallace, William, 4. 

Walpole, Sir Robert, 176. 

Wampanoag Indians, the, 129. 

Ward, Nathaniel, on liberty of con- 
science, 133; draws up the Massa- 
chusetts " Body of Liberties," 140. 

Warham, John, 141-142. 

Warren, Joseph, 193-194. 

Wars of the Roses, Paston Letters throw 
light on, 12-13. 

Warwick, Conn., beginnings of, 135, 154. 

Washington, George, 62, 157; letters of, 
edited by Sparks, 19; early military 
undertakings of, 106; with General 
Braddock, 107-108; assists in cap- 
turing Fort Duquesne, 112. 

Watertown, Mass., 136, 137, 138, 139, 

143- 

Watt, James, 251, 254. 

Wentworth, Thomas, Earl of Strafford, 

57. 

" Werewolves and Swan Maidens," Dr. 
Fiske's essay on, 298-299. 

Wethersfield, Conn., settlement of, 143. 

Wheelwright, John, 135, 136. 

Wilberforce, Samuel, encounter of, with 
Huxley, 201-203. 

William the Conqueror, period in his- 
tory of, 28. 

Williams, Roger, 134, 135, 142. 

Windsor, Conn., settlement of, 143. 

Winnebago Indians, the, 92-93. 

Winslow, Edward, 131. 

Winthrop, John, Governor of Massachu- 
setts, 134, 146. 



Winthrop, John (the younger). Governor 
of Connecticut, 149 n., 155-156. 

Witchcraft, disappearance of belief in 
277. 

Wolfe, General James, 113-115. 

Women, importation of, into Canada, 
85-86; the Delaware Indians sub- 
mit to be called, 95. 

Writing, invention of, stage in evolution 
of society marked by, 253. 



X Club, the, 204, 247. 
Xenophon, 7, 32. 



"Yanechek and the Water Demon," 

297- 
Year Books, the, importance of publica- 
tion of, 9. 
York, Maine, burned by French and 

Indians, 99. 
Youmans, E. L., version of the Wilber- 
force-Huxley encounter, 201-202; 
" Herbert Spencer on the Ameri- 
cans," etc., 229 n.; Dr. Fiske's Life 
of, 247. 
Young, Thomas, Milton's tutor, 41. 



Zendavesta, the, 288. 
Zend Ya^na, the, 288. 
" Zoological Mythology," Gubernatis', 
289 n. 



yr^-^V^^^/'VA/^ 



